Dawn Of War / Tropes A to L

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# - B

• Acceptable Breaks from Canon: Mostly for gameplay reasons. Crull's Blood Legion using Sorcerers despite being descended from the World Eaters (who slaughtered all their psykers on falling to Chaos) is a pretty big example.
• Actually Four Mooks: Imperial Guard Heavy Weapons teams in Dark Crusade are shown as a single soldier burdened with a heavy backpack when mobile, but when deploying a second soldier will suddenly appear to help setting up, reloading, and packing up the weapon. The second soldier vanishes upon packing up.
• Adaptational Badass: Some of the units in these games, for purposes of needing something to fit out a role for the game, are much stronger than in the tabletop.
  • The Great Knarloc in the first game, which is turned from a cheap monstrous creature into the Tau's super unit due to a lack of Tau heavy ground units in the source material when Dark Crusade was developed. While strong, it's still not considered especially useful in here or the tabletop due to it only be able to attack stuff in melee with no abilities.
  • The Techmarine, Apothecary, Warlock, Warp Spider Exarch, and Kommando Nob were turned from sergeant equivalents in the tabletop to full-fledged commanders in the second game.
• Adaptation Distillation: Some believe that the game neatly captures the feel of WH40K without needing a player to get all the sourcebooks. According to some early developer interviews, the Games Workshop people told Relic that they did not have to stick too closely to the word of the rules as long as they captured the spirit of them and that they should feel free to make any changes that improved gameplay as long as they stayed within that constraint.
  • Dawn of War II gets a bit closer to the tabletop, focusing on tactics and combined arms while doing away with base construction entirely. Buildings may still be present on a map as static objectives to capture, destroy or defend, or as terrain to occupy for cover and firing positions (Just as in the tabletop game).
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Multiple, simultaneous and devastating defensive deep strikes!
  Commissar Lord Bernn: I am restored and ready for revenge!
• Admiring the Abomination: Just before the Imperial Guard fight the Hive Lord at the start of their campaign, Castor calls it "a magnificent specimen". When asked why he's admiring it, he clarifies that he thinks it'll look good on his trophy wall.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: The second mission in Retribution has you fleeing from a stolen Baneblade until you can find some weapons to deal with it.
• Alignment-Based Endings: Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising has multiple endings depending on the morality of your squads (which fills in for the Karma Meter in the game) as well as several choices you make over the plot of the story. They range from your Commander replacing Davian Thule as captain of the Fourth Company and helping Gabriel Angelos and Apollo Diomedes cleanse the Blood Ravens of corruption to your Commander fleeing with your squads into the Eye of Terror and joining the Black Legion as a Chaos Lord.
• The All-Seeing A.I.:
  • In the first Dawn of War, the computer is unaffected by the fog of war and will always know where your units are, even the ones that are infiltrated. The computer even abuses this advantage by dropping Jump-capable or Teleport-capable units on top of you at any given opportunity. It also knows your army composition and specifically picks the proper heavy weapon upgrades for its squads (ie. if it's up against Chaos as Imperial Guard, it will upgrade its Guardsmen with plasma guns instead of grenade launchers).
  • Dawn of War II A.I. will always go for your resource points but will go to any lengths to avoid your exact line of sight. Simply placing a unit where they can see the point will deter the computer's efforts, at least until you move.
• Ambition Is Evil: Of course it is, it's 40K. The most triumphant example is Isador, who wanted to claim the Maledictum and use its powers for good.
  • Several of Vance Stubbs' AARs indicate the good general sees the whole campaign as an excellent career opportunity.
  • In the first game, the only one who matches Isador's ambition is Sindri Myr, who not only played everyone as a sucker but also achieved his end goal and was only stopped by an entire Chapter of Marines and an Inquisitor's Daemonhammer.
• Ambiguous Syntax: The ork commentary on the Big Bad Moon Shoota is confused as to it shoots moons that are big and bad, if it shoots moons while being big, or even if it's a big shoota that belongs to a Bad Moonz clan-affiliated ork.
• Amusing Injuries: Cultists are quite fond of yelling "AUGH, MAH SPLEEN!!!"
• Annoying Arrows: Wargear Upgrades like the Eldar Runes of Warding reduce the effectiveness of ranged attacks. Some of them are so effective that enemy bullets become nothing more than a trivial danger.
• Antagonistic Governor: In Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, the Imperial Guard General in both campaigns are the military governors of the places being fought over, playing the trope straight if you're not playing as them. In II, the governor has been stealing Blood Ravens relics for a very long time, and forces his aide to delay them for as long as possible so he can go on vacation and escape their retribution. Having a single bullet from an Astartes-exclusive weapon is punishable by summary execution; he's got four suits of Terminator armor, which is incalculably more valuable.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Your ultimate global ability in the campaign of Retribution becomes free when you have to shoot the final boss with it.
• Anti-Rage Quitting: In Dawn of War II, there is no save option in the campaign missions, and quitting counts as a loss. ^note Now crashing the game, on the other hand...
• Apocalyptic Log:
  • The opening cutscene for Dark Crusade, as well as a few of the location descriptions on the "Risk"-Style Map.
  • Chaos Rising has a few creepy ones from the Judgement of Carrion.
  • The Tyranid ending in Retribution is done like this. Ultimately, the Exterminatus fleet is driven away by the Hive Fleet, 94% of the Imperial Guard stationed in subsector Aurelia die before the surviving forces withdraw, and all loyalist Blood Ravens are killed while making a last stand. Presumably, the Tyranids then proceed to consume the sub-sector.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit:
  • In the first game, separate headcounts for vehicles and infantry, as well as caps on various units in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm.
  • In Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising, the campaign has a limit of four squads per mission and multiplayer has a 100-unit cap that effectively limits your force to about 9-10 squads. Retribution uses the multiplayer system for its campaign, with a lower 30-unit cap that can be increased by capturing certain buildings and/or using Honor Guard units in place of your Hero Units.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • The Imperium and the Forces of Chaos. Of all the forces the Imperium fights against, Chaos is fought most often and treated the most seriously. Their relationship with the Eldar and Orks is closer to The Usual Adversaries, while the Tyranids are an Outside-Context Problem.
  • The Eldar and the Necrons. In all three expansions of the first game, the former went on the warpath to stop the latter, and the after-action reports for the Necron and Eldar strongholds in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm (along with that of the Dark Eldar) mentions their conflict during the War in Heaven.
• The Artifact: Imperial Guardsmen were introduced in Winter Assault, which takes place on an ice planet. Later expansions added every kind of biome, but their models are still seen rubbing themselves to keep warm or with a visible breath.
• Artificial Brilliance: The AI in the first game is explicitly coded to avoid Suicidal Overconfidence.
  • It only intentionally engages the player in combat if the cumulative cost of its entire army is larger than the players unless the player attacks it first. But when it does, it brings its entire army. And yes, that does mean that taking casualties while attacking one of several AIs on a team will result in the other AIs immediately counterattacking the player's base with their entire army. Dark Crusade's campaign is so notorious for this due to its habit of pitting the player against two AI opponents when attacking high-value territories that battles can drag out for hours due to the player not being able to make any headway unless starting the match with a swift rush to knock one of the AIs out early on.
  • If the player attacks the AI and it moves to defend, any units that take even the slightest bit of damage will run away to the AI's nearest structure (which more often than not is a Listening Post, adding its firepower into the equation) in an attempt to pull the player into a chokepoint.
  • If the AI is on the offensive but takes so many casualties that its cumulative army cost drops too low relative to the player's, it will back off and retreat to rebuild instead of futilely pressing the attack.
  • If the AI has any units queued up for a deep strike, it will keep them on standby until it engages in battle, then drops them right next to the enemy (which is especially dangerous with Necron Flayed Ones which drain morale from nearby enemies and can break a much bigger infantry force's morale in seconds if allowed that close). It also knows how to use units that can jump or teleport and is scripted to immediately drop any such units right onto the nearest enemy unit on ranged stance to tie them up in melee and thus remove their firepower from the battle (and in the case of vehicles, restrict their movement so that they cannot run away). Note that jump units that are ranged specialists themselves such as Warp Spiders and Crisis Suits are specifically excluded from attempting this because they will not automatically engage in melee.
• Artificial Insolence:
  • Due to units functioning as squads, individual units in a squad will often hold still or move the wrong way as they wait for their squadmates to catch up with them (such as after being blown away by an artillery blast). Unfortunately, this also means they don't attack despite being in range of an enemy until the squad is back together, but the enemy has no problems shooting them. Defeat-in-detail ensues.
  • Units ordered to attack a unit that's fallen down will rush forward to attack it in melee, no matter how suicidal this may be. Only when the target unit is standing up will they shoot at it normally.
• Artificial Limbs: Lord General Castor of the Imperial Guard has an augmetic right arm, which he uses to hold and operate two-handed guns in one hand while holding an officer's power saber in the other.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Units in just about every Dawn of War game ever have unbelievably bad pathfinding skills.
    • Trying to move a tank from your base to the front-lines is enough to scatter your carefully positioned defensive infantry line like roaches when the tank barges through them on the most direct route. Alternatively, the tank gets stuck and refuses to move out because the defenders are set to Hold the Line mode, marking them as immovable to allied units.
    • If you do manage to get past this issue, giving combined infantry and armor forces a shared move or attack command results in 1) them getting stuck in each other, again, 2) individual soldiers from stuck squads charging forward without attacking because they're waiting for their squad to regroup before doing anything, 3) units getting into combat with the enemy piecemeal instead of all at once because, well, most of them are stuck in each other somewhere way back, or 4) taking up positions spread out across several screens' worth of the battlefield, forcing you to collect and reposition them one by one to restore some semblance of order. It's so bad that attacking with armor or infantry only, while rarely ideal, still proves to be the most effective approach due to the massively improved control you have over your imbecile forces. Of course, not all factions have the luxury of being able to field infantry/tank units that can deal with anything equally well.
    • Even worse, sometimes this feeds into itself: targeting a squad that's spread out the entire length of the map results in the targeting unit moving towards the middle of the squad instead of killing the isolated units.
    • Ordering a squad to move one way will sometimes result in the units moving in the exact opposite direction.
  • The AI of the first game is set to prioritize more expensive units for production if it has a choice, which frequently results in the AI making nothing but hero units and sending them off to die every couple of seconds if it's backed into its own base.
  • The "jump/teleport everyone who can jump/teleport to the nearest unit on ranged stance" behavior mentioned under Artificial Brilliance does not check for the target actually being a squad better at ranged combat than melee, only its current stance. So setting a squad of melee specialists like Khorne Berzerkers on ranged stance will result in the AI jumping right next to them and getting cut down for their trouble. It also does not check whether the AI's units are actually effective against the target, which results in Predators getting mobbed by Stormboyz that can barely even scratch tanks.
  • The Assassination victory condition results in defeat if your Hero Unit dies, so the computer will always attach it to the first squad it builds. However, it never switches them, keeping them attached to their weakest unit for the rest of the game. For that matter, they always let said hero join attack heavily-defended bases instead of hiding them away.
  • Any unit told to attack a fallen unit will do so in melee, including those that have no business being in melee like Fire Warriors. Similarly, telling them to attack a squad that's been scattered will result in them moving forwards until they can attack the whole squad.
  • Units in melee combat tend to ignore orders telling them to attack a different target than the one they're engaged with.
  • The Imperial Guard, Chaos, and Necron AIs are prone to getting their tanks stuck behind their own buildings. The Eldar do the same with their Avatar, though in this case it's not as stupid as keeping the Avatar alive gives better bonuses than combat.
  • Tau armies always send their Ethereal into melee, never give the Commander extra weapons, and never increase their Kroot squads' HP through cannibalism.
  • The computer abuses their ability to see the whole map by dropping Jump-capable and Teleport-capable units on top of your nearest ones. This is normally devastating if the attacked unit is alone and bad at melee but it becomes a minor annoyance if you have overwhelming superiority in numbers.
    • The AI also seems to be scripted to jump or teleport to the lowest-health unit it can see as soon as it is in range. This can result in scenes like a Necron Lord completely ignoring a wall of Fire Warriors trying to gank the lone Earth Caste Builder behind them, teleporting to the Builder, hitting it once, then aggroing onto the Fire Warriors.
  • Your artillery units will gleefully fire into swarms of your own infantry to hit a single enemy scout, scattering your infantry and destroying their morale.
  • Infantry in II automatically Take Cover! on their own to free up some micromanagement. Unfortunately, they may do so even as a ranged squad under attack by a melee squad which is pitiful at range, causes them to waste time running into cover when they should just be shooting continuously... and the cover they choose to get behind can be closer to the enemy melee squad, making it easier for the melee squad to tie up the rest of the individual's squad and force them all into melee combat (which, as a ranged squad, they will probably lose at).
  • A.I. Opponents in II will also do this aplenty in Multiplayer mode. Difficulty primarily dictates what units the enemy will build. Easy will have the enemy send in their most basic troops to be sacrificed on the guns of your own. Normal lets them use some of the more powerful infantry. Hard starts adding in vehicles (typically, a transport or two, and their top-level, limit 1 vehicle/monster.) Expert has them willing to use all units, and tend to be a bit more aggressive at pushes.
    • Which leads us to the second issue. The A.I. appears to have three combat "strategies". Strategy 1, they trickle units towards your base, one at a time, and form a neat orderly line. Sometimes this is of some concern (Say, Ork Killa Kans, or a Battlewagon). Most of the time though, they'll be content sending an infantry unit, no matter how poorly suited they are for the task, to try and take tiny little nibbles out of your base's H Ps. Say, Ripper Swarms happily accepting the Emperor's fury at small annoying creatures, via two to three Twin-Linked Heavy Bolter Turrets, in less than 5 seconds. Strategy 2, has them run about capturing Power and Resource nodes, then immediately retreating, with no defense left to watch over them. Strategy 3, and perhaps the most annoying especially in Annihilate victory conditions (and one commonly seen when they have allies), is to just sit at their base, and build units, sending only their Commander unit, and maybe a heavy unit or two out to do anything else. It's annoying because it means you'll take heavy losses unless you have a forward respawn unit with them and keeping everyone healed and repaired, but once you bleed the enemy out of a lot of expensive units, it becomes easy to start blasting apart anything that does get called in at their base. Plus they tend to group up so nicely together for Orbital Bombardments.
• Artistic License – Military: In-Universe, the Alpha Legion are supposed to be pragmatic combatants who are masters of Confusion Fu and stealth. However Lord Bale shows no sign of such, being a General Failure who lets his Hyper-Competent Sidekick Sindri Myr do all the planning. The same applies to Firaeveus Carron mentioned below.
• Artistic License – Religion: In-Universe. Firaeveus Carron is quite possibly the least knowledgeable Khornate ever, what with building temples to Khorne (Khorne explicitly does not want temples built to him, as time spent building them is time not spent fighting and shedding blood) and claiming that they will choke the enemy to death (a method of killing that results in no bloodshed and no skulls to take). To make matters worse, the aforementioned temples are used to project a shield (because hiding behind defenses is completely and absolutely how to endear yourself to the god of Villainous Valour) that poisons any non-Chaos units that step inside it (again, no blood or skulls. Also, that's Nurgle's thing, so the "sacrifices" would be going to him and not Khorne). And to top it all off, upon his stronghold's defeat, Carron flees like a Dirty Coward while crying about Chaos abandoning him. You know you've failed as a follower of Khorne when your Chaos cultists show more bravery in standing their ground and fighting to the last man.
• Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?:
  Gorgutz: I got me da skullz of all da warbosses I killed, Sturnn'z skull and dat Farseer'z skull. So who I missin'? Oh yeah! Dat git Crull. I need 'iz skull fer me pointy stik! And you know how I'm gettin' him ta come after me?
  Stupid: ...Yer gonna call 'im a grot?
• Ascended Extra: Sgt. Merrick, a Mauve Shirt Imperial Guardsman from the Dawn of War II campaign who was present at the Tyranid incursion at Angel Gate as well as supporting the Blood Ravens during their suicide-mission strike at the heart of the Hive Fleet, becomes a playable hero character for the Imperial Guard faction in the Retribution expansion.
• Ascended Glitch: Due to a bug in the physics engine, corpses in II will occasionally float around the screen for a while before disappearing. Relic proceeded to deliberately use the effect for the Ork Weirdboy's death animation.
• Ascended Meme: A lot in Retribution:
  • Order the Commissar Lord Hero into a Chimera (an APC) and he will say, "Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!". This is a reference to an image depicting a Commissar waving his sword from atop a Leman Russ with the line captioned underneath.
  • One of the Ork's beamy deffguns is called the "Box Smasha", described as being used for taking away the humans' "metal boxes", which means that the meme ^note (Chaos Lord Firaeveus Carron's hatred of Rhinos, disdainfully referring to them as 'Metal Boxes') has gone full recursive.
  • The Last Stand mode introduces a Tau Crisis Suit Commander as a hero unit, available through DLC. He has a couple of associated Steam achievements, one of which is called "Dynamic Entry", in reference to this popular customized tabletop model.◊ The achievement requires that he duplicate the action in that picture by landing on and killing a hundred different units, and is rewarded with an additional piece of wargear for doing so.
  • The term "Magpies", as a way to describe the Blood Ravens and their memetic reputation for Kleptomania, has been used once by way of a side mission against an Ork Force on Meridian during the Space Marine Campaign of Retribution:
    Ork Nob: Keep dese thievin' magpies off da last node!
• Asshole Victim: The treatment the Dark Eldar get at the end of their Stronghold mission if you're playing as Chaos or Orks, both fates involving being put in their own cages. Carron and his men subject them to their own torture methods; Gorgutz' boyz make sport of throwing those cages around the low-gravity moon to see how far they can throw them.
• As You Know:
  • Indrick Boreale's memetic speech in Soulstorm has him saying it word for word when reminding his troops about their reinforcements in space, who are prepared to quickly drop onto the battlefield.
  • Also used, with less gusto, by the regimental commissar in the Guard's stronghold intro telling the General that only the best-trained crews can serve Baneblades, and by Or'es'ka telling Aun'royr about the state of their reinforcement fleet. Lampshaded by General Stubbs who cuts off the Commissar to remind him he already knows so explaining it further isn't necessary.
• A-Team Firing: The Orks of Warhammer 40,000 generally don't really 'aim', but Dawn of War II has an ability for the 'Shoota Boyz' squad called "Aiming? Wot'z dat?" if they are upgraded with a Big Shoota, which allows them to suppress an enemy squad (because of their previous aiming abilities, or lack thereof, apparently made their fire not all that threatening. Strangely, it also reduces their damage until the squad is suppressed, so More Dakka was apparently working for them pretty well.)
• Attack Pattern Alpha:
  • "Initiating attack protocol 23" (Space Marines) and "Phoenix pattern, initiated" (Eldar).
  • There's even a non-offensive variant from the Space Marine Servitor; "Build routine 721^note Pronounced 7, 2, 1 initiated."
• Auto-Doc:
  • Eldar Webway Gates can be upgraded to provide a healing aura.
  • In Retribution, the Imperial Guard can build bunkers, which can be upgraded with medical stations to provide a similar healing aura.
• Atop a Mountain of Corpses: For a given value of "top". The trailer for Dawn of War 3 begins and ends with a large, hollow mountain being filled by a constant rain of Astartes, Ork, and Eldar corpses of all kinds, ranging from infantry to Wraithknights.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • An undeniable case would be sync kills from Dawn Of War II onwards - they look very cool, and the unit performing it cannot die until the animation is finished, but they still can change your sweeping advance from annihilating to just devastating against retreating units, or make it easier for the unit to be killed by retaliation due to being forced to be completely stationary for a couple of seconds instead of retreating.
  • The Tau's Knarloc is, for all intents and purposes, a T-Rex that eats enemy units alive and makes satisfyingly loud booms as it approaches. Unfortunately, it has the least HP of any relic unit^note fully upgraded, at least; assuming all relic units fresh out of the box, Knarloc tied for second-highest, has no ranged attack at all, and is so slow it spends most of its time turning around.
  • A fully upgraded Tau commander has three independently-targeting weapons that can, in theory, all be used against the same target. The overlap between the flamer and the missiles is very small, however.
  • The two heavy Tau battlesuits count as infantry, which means they can't be repaired by worker units, but they're also the only infantry units other than the Chaos worker unit that don't self-heal at all. It's not that much of an issue for the Broadside suits - their huge range and insane damage output should keep them out of harm's way most of the time anyway - but the Crisis suits are generally deployed to the front-line and therefore liable to take a beating that they can never recover from.
  • Autocannons in Dawn of War II look cool and fire explosive rounds but are actually worse than Heavy Bolters because they do not suppress the targeted group. They're something of a Jack of All Stats that can deal with both vehicles and infantry but not as well as dedicated weapons.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: The Orks have the Trukk; the Marines, Sisters of Battle, and Chaos Marines have the Rhino (Dawn of War II and its expansions have the Space Marines using the Razorback variant, and the Chaos Marines stuck to foot-slogging); and the Imperial Guard have the Chimera. Space Marines also have the Land Raider (Redeemer variant in Dawn of War II). Tau Devilfish, while invisible, are decidedly non-boxy, as are the jump-capable Eldar and Dark Eldar transports.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: In the final cinematic for the Space Marine campaign in Retribution, Gabriel Angelos becomes Chapter Master.
• Ax-Crazy: Chaos Space Marines. They won't even deny it.
  Chaos Space Marines: Sanity... is for the weak!
  Chaos Space Marines: I feel the Warp overtaking me... it is a good pain!
  • Hell, nearly all of the Chaos faction. The daemons are probably sane but still evil.
• Badass Boast: Everyone, and every single unit. Except for the Chaos Cultists.
  • Space Marine Dreadnoughts in the second game do this a lot:
    "I will endure a thousand deaths before I yield."
    "That thing is no more terrible than I."
    "Faith is what fans the guttering spark of my existence."
  • In addition to the requisite "I fear no evil, for I am fear incarnate!" speech from Space Marines, the Vindicare Assassin unit of the Imperial Guard gets a good one.
    Assassin: They will quake at my shadow.
  • Merrick gets a brilliant one in Retribution, made better for being just a regular soldier preparing to engage the Big Bad.
    Merrick: He might be waiting for us, but he isn't ready for us.
  • Let's not forget Governor-Militant Alexander's opening address to you when you attack his stronghold in Dark Crusade.
    Alexander: Enemies of the Imperium, hear me. You have come here to die. The immortal Emperor is with us and we are invincible. His soldiers will strike you down. His war machines will crush you under their treads. His mighty guns will bring the very sky crashing down upon you. You cannot win. The Emperor has given us His greatest weapon to wield, so make yourselves ready, we are the 1st Kronus Regiment, and today is our Victory Day!
  • The Baneblade gets a lot of these.
    Baneblade: Ready to unleash eleven barrels of Hell!
    Baneblade: Who's DYING NOW!?
  • Pretty much anything the Daemon Prince says:
    Daemon Prince: Despair, for I am the end of days!
    Daemon Prince: They hear their doom approaching.
    Daemon Prince: I AM DESTRUCTION INCARNATE!
  • Eliphas, not content to have the sexiest voice in all of DoW, speaks like the fearless Badass he is:
    Eliphas: I WILL SHATTER THEIR SOULS!
    Eliphas: Can no one offer me a challenge?
  • Check out this exchange:
    Davian Thule: We will send you back to your craftworld in a tomb!
    Farseer Taldeer: I have known my death for ten of your lifetimes, captain. Don't think to scare me with it.
  • Not to mention the Eldar Warlock in Dawn of War II:
    Eldar Warlock: Neither killing nor dying frightens me. Feel my wrath, humans!
    Eldar Warlock: Feel the force of a disciplined mind!
  • Archon Tahril gets a good one:
    Archon Tahril: I am the deadly shadow and the bird of prey! I am the poisoned dagger that brings sweet death!
  • Ork Nobz in the sequel after killing Space Marines:
    Nobz: Angels of Death, me shiny green arse!
  • Or the Nobz getting attacked in melee:
    Nobz: You're gonna chop me?! I'M GONNA KILL YOU!
• Badass Creed: The Blood Ravens have two. The first, representing the dark, secretive nature of the chapter, is "Knowledge is power, guard it well," which serves as a grim foreshadowing of the corruption running deep in the chapter. Internal reformers like Gabriel Angelos, and later, Apollo Diomedes, have another, which is far more badass, declaring their intention to reforge their chapter into one worthy of respect: "None shall find us wanting."
• Badass Normal: Sergeant Merrick of the 85th Vendoland in Dawn of War II and its expansions. This guy survived a Tyranid invasion, fought through The Corruption, lived through the next 10 years of constant war, and even survives being mauled by Tyranids and an Earth-Shattering Kaboom in Retribution's Imperial Guard campaign.
• Badass Preacher: The Space Marine Chaplain and Imperial Guard Priest, who debuted Winter Assault, and the Sisters of Battle Missionary and Confessor, both members of the Ecclesiarchy, from Soulstorm. However, the one everyone remembers best is none other than Eliphas the Inheritor of the Word Bearers Chaos Legion, who debuted in Dark Crusade.
• Badass Teacher: Cyrus gets VERY angry when the Black Legion starts attacking initiates (many of whom he had personally trained). So angry that not letting him join to kick their ass causes corruption.
• Bad Boss:
  • Chaos Lord Bale has a cultist that delivers bad news killed.
  • Chaos Lord Crull orders the execution of a Chaos Space Marine that got stepped on by Gorgutz for "embarrassing" him.
  • Abbadon, when he appears in Retribution, also fits, no surprise given all the fluff goes into what a jerk he is, threatening to kill Eliphas every time he talks to him.
  • Eliphas himself counts towards Kain and Neroth. Given that he constantly derides their fighting prowess and he basically kills them in the ending for his campaign.
  • And of course, Commissars can restore morale not only to their squad but surrounding ones as well by executing a random soldier in it.
• Bag of Spilling:
  • Unlike Dark Crusade expansion released before it, in Soulstorm, all captured points and non-pre-deployed buildings are removed when you beat a map, forcing you to restart almost from scratch.
  • Most of the loot acquired in the Dawn of War II campaign is missing if you import a completed campaign into Chaos Rising. Justified since the Strike Cruiser they were stored in self-destructs during the final mission. You also begin with your Terminator armor damaged and unusable until you acquire Martellus to fix it.
  • In Retribution's Space Marine campaign, Cyrus has lost not only all of his equipment but all of his skills as well. The same goes for Tarkus.
• Balance Buff: In Soulstorm, Khornate Berserkers were given the Mark of Khorne ability, which scares enemies away when used. The Necron Lord was given the ability to channel the C'tan Deceiver in addition to the Nightbringer (the Nightbringer is invincible Grim Reaper, the Deceiver can temporarily Mind Control an enemy and summon a fake Monolith).
• Barrier-Busting Blow: In Dawn of War II, your Marines in Terminator armor can destroy cover by just walking through it.
• Base on Wheels: Fully upgraded Necron Monoliths in Dark Crusade and Soul Storm become mobile artillery platforms, while retaining the ability to produce units.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: Some Strongholds have a secret weapon which you can take control of and use against the defending force. This includes the Titan cannon in the Imperial Guard stronghold and Space Marine Orbital Relay of Dark Crusade and the orbital defense system (which can fire on other planets) in the Tau stronghold in Soulstorm.
• Betrayal by Inaction:
  • Sindri's last sacrifice to the Chaos Gods is his master, Lord Bale, whom he leaves when Bale is surrounded by the Blood Ravens. This is what Sindri is most remembered for. (Or more accurately, thanks to Bale's cry of "SIIINDRIII!")
  • In Winter Assault, this happens whichever faction you're fighting as in the penultimate level. Both sides consist of two factions nominally allied with each other, and whichever faction you're playing as at the end goes through the gate towards the Titan, leaving the other one fighting off Orks and Chaos/Imperial Guardsmen and Eldar (though if Chaos wins, the Orks turn on each other as well).
  • In Chaos Rising, Eliphas, the Obviously Evil Treacherous Advisor to Araghast, allows him to die at the hands of the Blood Ravens when he refuses to open a portal again. As fans like to say, Araghast was Sindri'd by Eliphas.
• Beware the Quiet Ones:
  • The Necrons don't have any unit quotes apart from mechanical beeping noises. The Tyranids make a lot of shrieks and growls but only the Hive Mind speaks at all. Both of them can still mop the floor with their opponents.
  • The Necron Lord has all of two lines in Dark Crusade (Tomas Maccabee is usually his Mouth of Sauron). He makes said noises at Eliphas, who is terrified of the first time, and responds with "This Cannot Be!" the second.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Right at the beginning of the original Dawn of War campaign, the Imperial Guard are trying (and failing) to fight off a mob of Orks attacking the Tartarus Spaceport; cue the arrival of the Blood Ravens by mass drop-pods and them mopping up the assailants.
  • In the intro to Dawn of War II; there's a point where the Space Marine Sergeant is being chased by a pair of Eldar Howling Banshees, and then a Dreadnought that wasn't taking part in the early fight shows up out of nowhere (literally bursting through a cliff face!) and kills both of the Eldar.
  • This is based on the opening for the original Dawn of War, where Orks are trying to overrun a Space Marine position down a hill. When jumping up to attack, automatic fire literally blasts them away. Then, a Dreadnought shows up and joins the fight.
  • Gabriel Angelos and the chapter fleet couldn't have picked a better, more dramatic moment for their arrival, really.
  • Lampshaded in an early mission in the same game; one of the squads you pick up introduces himself by dropping in via Jump Pack and slashing up a mob of Orks attacking you from a cliff. He then jumps down and properly joins your force.
    Tarkus: Ork gunners on the ridge! Take cover!
    ???: Fury from the sky!! Cut them down! (THUMP!) Sergeant Thaddeus, reporting for duty, Commander.
    Avitus: Did you have a pleasant rest, waiting for the most dramatic moment to strike?
    Thaddeus: Good to see you too, Avitus.
  • The Force Commander and his strike force pull two epic ones on Meridian. The first being when they arrive to save Angel's Gate from the Tyranids. Rescuing the defenders, and holding back gate until it can be closed. The second coming in Chaos Rising where the player can help defend the capital against chaos forces. Killing hundreds of traitors and chaos marines alongside guard forces at the feet of the Governor's Palace.
  • While the Hive Tyrant isn't exactly difficult unless you're under-leveled, seeing Davian Thule, newly entombed as a Dreadnought, deep striking into the battlefield and absolutely wrecking the Tyrant's shit singlehandedly is undoubtedly impressive.
• Beneficial Disease: In Retribution, the healing of Chaos units is done through the powers of Nurgle, by means of Nurgle's Rot. The infected units get back to the fight as their senses get numbed to the pain and their wounds get sealed by cancerous growths.
• BFS:
  • Space Marines usually wield oversized blades one-handed. Even their basic combat knife is pretty big by normal human standards.
  • Imperial Guard Priests and Sisters of Battle Repentia carry oversized two-handed Eviscerator chainswords.
  • In Dawn of War II, the Wraithlord wields a sword about half as big as itself.
  • The Eldar Avatar of Khaine in both games and Chaos's Great Unclean One in II has the biggest swords around.
• BFG: Heavy weapons in general, like Heavy Bolters and Lascannons.
  • The Assault Cannon used by the Space Marine Terminators deserve special mention.
  • In Dawn of War II, Devastator Marines can have Plasma Cannons, which certainly qualify even by Space Marine standards.
  • The Sniper Rifle Cyrus carries is almost as big as he is.
  • None of these can hold a candle to the Hellstorm Cannon unearthed near the Imperial Guard's stronghold on Kronus in Dark Crusade. It's an Imperator Titan-scaled, gatling-style Energy Weapon with a muzzle bore wide enough to drive a heavy battle tank through with generous room to spare. It can only fire down the giant trench in front of its barrels, but even being vaguely near the discharge will One-Hit Kill absolutely anything in the game.
• Bigger Is Better: Shoota Boyz actually say this when upgraded with 'Big Shootas', which are clear improvements from their regular Shootas.
• Big Bad: Generally one or two per game.
  • Chaos Lord Bale for Dawn of War until his role is usurped by SIIIINDRIIIII!!!
  • In Winter Assault, either Chaos Lord Crull, Warboss Gorgutz 'Ead 'Unter, or the Necrons as a whole.
  • Dark Crusade had a campaign for each faction, but either Eliphas the Inheritor, Gorgutz 'Ead 'Unter, or the Necron Lord of Kronus could be considered.
  • No one force is most responsible for the events of Dawn of War II, though the most threatening is probably the Tyranid Hive Mind.
  • Chaos Rising has Ulkair, the Great Unclean One and tainted Blood Raven Chapter Master Azariah Kyras.
  • Kyras is once again the Big Bad of Retribution. It is revealed that he has been collaborating with the daemon released from the Maledictum in Dawn of War, and they both have secretly manipulated the events of the entire series up to that point.
• Bigger Than Jesus: In Winter Assault, Gorgutz' Number Two tells him he's bigger than established-in-setting Warbosses Nazdreg and Ghazghkull. Gorgutz retorts that no one's bigger than Ghazghkull... yet.
• Big Good: Gabriel Angelos in Dawn of War II and its expansions. In Retribution's Space Marine campaign, he becomes the new Chapter Master of the Blood Ravens after Kyras is destroyed.
• Big "NO!": Gabriel Angelos invokes this trope during the final mission of Dawn of War.
• Bling of War: Some of the higher-level armor that the player can equip in Dawn of War II and its expansions goes into this territory, such as having inlays of elaborate gold sculptures. The Force Commanders from Dawn of War and its expansions have this by default.
• Blood from the Mouth: The Carnifex horks up a veritable torrent of vomit and blood when killed.
• Blown Across the Room:
  • Airstrikes, artillery, grenades, and some of the less subtle guns can knock down and scatter most infantry squads.
  • When a Tyranid synapse creature like a Warrior or Zoanthrope dies, it sends out a shockwave that does this to nearby non-synapse Tyranids.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: In Dawn of War and its expansions, armor upgrades increase unit HP, instead of reducing the damage received outright. Averted in Dawn of War II onwards.
• Bolivian Army Ending: Played straight twice, and subverted once.
  • Near the end of the Order campaign in Winter Assault, your side pragmatically realizes that the other side will probably turn on them once they've found the Titan. Rather than endanger their own people, they leave their temporary allies sealed behind a forcefield facing a tide of enemies and wave good-bye. However, General Sturnn is badass enough to fight his way out and turns up to help fight the Necrons in the final mission.
  • When the Eldar stronghold is conquered in Dark Crusade, Farseer Taldeer will have one of these. In a slight subversion, her fate is revealed to the player in all but one case.
  • Subverted in Dawn of War II, when your troops, having succeeded in poisoning the Tyranid Hive Mind, are left in the center of an endless swarm of enemies with their evac ship blown up. They prepare to go out fighting when Gabriel Angelos, the hero from the first game, shows up with the Blood Ravens fleet, delivers some macho dialogue, bombards the hell out of the advancing horrors, then joins you to fight the last boss and take you home.
• Bombardier Mook:
  • The Imperial Guard gets a Marauder bomber as its air unit, which can perform bombing runs using incendiary, krak, or smoke bombs, but otherwise uses its guns to defend itself.
  • The ork Fighta-Bomma is a flying artillery unit, slowly firing highly-unaccurate Grot Bombs at targets from very long distances.
• Bond One-Liner: Dawn of War II forwards, this was a fairly common way for units to announce a confirmed kill. Chaos, with Eliphas in particular, gains bonus points for having the best.
• Boom, Headshot!: Units with Sniper Rifles can one-shot many infantry targets.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • For all the awesome units the Space Marines can get throughout the series, you'll nearly always find yourself having a use for your Tactical Marines, especially in the campaign of Dawn of War II. Sergeant Tarkus and his Tactical Marines may not have the best weapons or explosives, but they can be upgraded to be the toughest troops in your entire strike force.
  • The Tau get some of the most awesome upper-tier units in the game, but a fighting force composed almost entirely of Fire Warriors led by a Tau Commander with Kroot Carnivores and Vespid Stingwings as support fighters can win a game at virtually every tier, so long as the relevant upgrades are purchased.
  • Certain attachable units like Kroot Shapers for the Tau and Apothecaries for the Space Marines aren't particularly flashy but provide useful general-purpose bonuses that can give the attached-to squad a real tactical advantage.
  • Necron Builder Scarabs have far more uses than the average Worker Unit. They're the only Necron unit capable of capturing strategic points, as well as being one of their only detectors. As such, they're the only worker to become an Honour Guard unit in campaign mode, such is their importance.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy:
  • In an early level in Retribution, blowing up targeting cogitators causes nearby turrets to fire at the player's enemies. It might not be such a good idea to park your Baneblade in a potential crossfire between them.
  • The Deadly Dodging that helps beat Daisy the Battlewagon more easily, though if you have something that can stun it, you can just keep Cherry Tapping it forever.
• Bottomless Magazines: Everything that can shoot, can do so indefinitely. Cleverly subverted in Dawn of War II onwards, where units frequently stop shooting to reload (although they still never run out of replacement magazines). Several weapons in the various campaigns do not require reloading and can keep firing indefinitely, though this is usually offset by shorter range or having to set it up. For instance, The Never-Ending Hail of Devastation item never has to reload. There is no good explanation for this aside from making it all the more impressive as an Infinity +1 Sword among heavy bolters.
• Brain Monster: The Weirdboy in 2 has an upgrade called Bigger Brains, the icon for which shows his brain swelling out of his skull.
• Break Meter: The Morale Meter. In addition to hit points the player has to manage their squad's Morale points which, if depleted, squads will die twice as quick and deal barely any damage at best. Space Marines can add sergeants who can rally their Battle-Brothers to victory.
  • Flamers and snipers quickly tear trough morale points but snipers take a long time between shots and only used by Space Marine Scouts and flamers have no range, have to be held in place to fire, and only really work when melee units are involved.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Messing around with targeting your ultimate global ability on Daemon Prince Kyras has the main hero of the campaign give you shit for it.
• Bring It: One of the Space Marines battle quotes.
  Space Marine: Come! Show me what passes for fury among your misbegotten kind!
• Bug War: The main plot of Dawn of War II. Still happening on a smaller-scale in Chaos Rising, which also has a classic redux of Space Hulk, and Retribution, which also lets you play it from the Bugs' point of view in the Tyranid campaign.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • The Imperial Guard, played seriously. Consistently low/bottom tier in the first game, they have in-game models in the second game but were not playable until Retribution.
  • Chaos Cultists, the only units in the first game to have their role listed as "meat shield".

C & D

• The Cameo:
  • The Nightbringer was the only C'tan to appear in Dark Crusade, but the Necron Stronghold featured "beacons" dedicated to the Deceiver and the Void Dragon. The Deceiver later got added to the game in Soulstorm.
  • In Soulstorm Farseer Caerys can obtain a Shuriken Pistol said to have been used by Eldrad Ulthuan, the leader of Craftworld Ulthwé.
  • Some Eldar units which never made it into either game, such as Swooping Hawks, get Aspect Stones in Retribution that Kayleth can equip as Commander items. The same is true of other units that were left out of Dawn of War II, such as Fire Dragons.
• Campfire Character Exploration: When the Space Marines are trapped onboard the Space Hulk having finally witnessed that their Chapter Master is a servant of Chaos, Diomedes (who's still undergoing a Heroic BSoD) tells them to wait for reinforcements. This causes the Ancient Tarkus from the previous games to break his vow of silence,, and snap Diomedes from his funk.
• Cannibalism Superpower: Kroot Carnivore squads can eat the flesh of units from other factions (allied or enemies) to gain a health bonus which is then spread to all existing and future Kroot Carnivore squads.
• Carnivorous Healing Factor: Kroot units gain hit points, including increasing their maximum HP, by consuming corpses.
• Catchphrase: The Blood Ravens get one in Retribution, even spoken in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.
  Blood Ravens: None shall find us wanting.
• Canon: The Dawn of War series' multiple endings have always been vague with its canon, but a few things are known.
  • Gabriel Angelos "won" the first game on Tartarus, releasing the Daemon in the Maledictum in the process.
  • The Eldar won Winter Assault, since Dark Crusade mentions the 1st Kronus Liberators were initially assigned to hunt Taldeer down for vengeance. Although the Orks didn't win the campaign overall, they still beat the Chaos Space Marines. Gorgutz killed Crull and took his skull, and takes to fight in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm.
    • The Hammer of the Emperor sourcebook for Only War mentions that the 412th were betrayed and driven off the planet by the Eldar after reaching the Titan and fending off the Necrons, according to the few survivors. Sturnn was among the casualties of this betrayal. Bear in mind, however, that Games-Workshop has stated on the record that all codices reports are written as in-universe propaganda.
    • However, Dawn of War II: Retribution claims the Imperium to have won Winter Assault courtesy of lore description on the item Shield of Sturnn, which states "This armor belonged to General Sturnn of 412th Cadian, who heroically led his regiment to recover a fallen Imperator Titan on Lorn V." As this is in-game, it has better canon standing.
  • The Blood Ravens won in Dark Crusade, and slaughtered pretty much everyone else, including the Imperial Guard, in the process.
  • As was revealed in Dawn of War III, Gorgutz triumphed in the Kaurava conflict in Soulstorm. The Blood Ravens were defeated and lost three whole companies, leaving the chapter dangerously undermanned.
  • The Blood Ravens manage to stop the Tyranids in Dawn of War II.
  • In Chaos Rising, the Force Commander slew Ulkair with a Thunder Hammer, then was sent on a hundred-year penitent crusade into the Eye of Terror along with Thaddeus for having been touched by Chaos. Avitus despaired at his role in the Kronus campaign and betrayed the Blood Ravens. Tarkus killed him then took a vow of penance. Diomedes is not killed or corrupted by Galan.
  • The victor of Retribution is uncertain, but we know that neither Eliphas nor the Tyranids won since the Blood Ravens appear in the subsequent Space Marine, which also mentions the Aurelian Crusade.^note However, there's nothing stated about when Space Marine happens in relation to the series, and it also does not specify which of the three Aurelian Crusades is being referred to (The First Crusade is Dawn of War II, the Second is Chaos Rising, the Third is Retribution). For all we know, Space Marine might have taken place between Chaos Rising and Retribution, or even right after Dawn of War II.
    • The Deathwatch sourcebook, Honour The Chapter includes rules and fluff for the Blood Ravens and mentions the events of Retribution and Angelos' ascension to Chapter Master. While a sidebar mentions that the RPG's setting material assumes a campaign set in 817.M41 (at least a century or so before the Dawn of War games), this does make it seem that the Space Marine ending is the canonical one. It would also fix that mis-print in White Dwarf around the first game's release that referred to Angelos as Chapter Master instead of a Captain.
    • Dawn of War III confirms that Gabriel is now Chapter Master and that Diomedes' remark of no longer being able to serve the chapter in the same manner as before at the end of his campaign in Retribution meant Diomedes becoming a Chaplain. Jonah is also confirmed to have survived the final battle despite his injuries and is now Chief Librarian of the Blood Ravens.
• Canon Immigrant:
  • The Blood Ravens chapter of Space Marines were specifically created by Relic for exclusive use in the Dawn of War series. Since the series began, they have been acknowledged as a small part of the wider WH40K canon, being mentioned in a few novels and having their color scheme displayed in the core rulebook.
  • Games Workshop has since produced a miniature for the Eldar Bonesinger, introduced in the first game.
• Cap Raiser: Infantry and vehicles use separate caps, limited to 20 for both (usually). However, each faction uses a different way to achieve maximum cap:
  • Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, and Sisters of Battle use research to increase each cap by 5.
  • Every Webway Gate built by the Eldar increases their cap further. The Avatar of Khaine also increases both caps by 4 (but since it costs 5, it actually only decreases it by 1).
  • The Orks increase their cap by building WAAAGH! Banners. They have a maximum of 100 cap, since unlike other factions, each individual ork in a squad takes up 1-2 population. Some units are only available past a certain amount of units, and a bug allows a player to save and load a game, resetting the cap to zero, allowing them to train hundreds of units.
  • The Tau and Dark Eldar increase their cap via upgrade buildings.
  • Every production building built by the Imperial Guard increases the corresponding cap by 2.
  • The Necrons' cap increases with every Obelisk they build.
• Cast from Sanity:
  • Psykers lose morale when casting lightning (the original effect, still present in the tooltip, was a possibility of killing the psyker).
  • In Chaos Rising, you can find Chaos-corrupted wargear, which tends to be much better than standard equipment, but causes the character to fall towards Chaos and gain evil traits and abilities, along with determining the identity of the traitor in the team. Conversely, you can find "penitent" equipment that restricts the character's stats, but reduces their corruption.
• Casting Gag:
  • The fact that the Commissars in the first game are voiced by the same guy who did M. Bison in the Street Fighter cartoon is probably not a coincidence.
  • Certainly no more coincidental than Bluddflagg sharing his voice actor with Garrosh Hellscream from World of Warcraft.
• The Cavalry:
  • Played with in the canon ending of Winter Assault, where Sturnn and the Imperial Guard show up with the full intention of fighting the Eldar, but Taldeer convinces them to help her fight the Necrons instead.
  • Whenever a Leman Russ is deployed in Dawn of War's expansions:
    Leman Russ pilot: Tell the men the cavalry has arrived.
• Chainsaw Good: Many units have a Chainsword, but of note is the Eviscerator model wielded by the Imperial Guard Priest and the Sisters Repentia squad from the Sisters of Battle.
• Character Exaggeration: The Memetic Mutation at the expense of Indrick Boreale — his accent is very obvious and a bit silly, but the jokes about it make it sound like his voice actor was on helium or something.
• A Chat with Satan: In the Chaos campaign for Retribution, Eliphas talks with Ulkair (a Greater Daemon of Nurgle), offering it a chance to join their fight against the now Khorne-aligned marines. Ulkair thinks this is a splendid idea.
• Chekhov's Gun: The Dawn of War II loading screen introducing Tarkus mentions that he earned a Crux Terminatus badge during the Kronus campaign. During the battle for Angel Forge, he's forced to choose between guarding a stolen collection of chapter relics or abandoning it to Ork looters to go help his fellow Blood Ravens fighting Idranel, who already predicted that Tarkus' sense of honor is too strong to abandon his post. Tarkus instead chose to Take a Third Option and join the fight while simultaneously guarding said relics by wearing them on his person. The relics in question? Terminator armor, which only Space Marines who earned a Crux Terminatus are even trained to operate. This catches the Farseer completely by surprise and she openly admits it as such before Tarkus personally delivers the killing blow.
• Chunky Updraft:
  • Tau and Space Marine orbital bombardments, followed by a Pillar of Light from the Kill Sat.
  • Eldar Farseers (and other psykers equipped with certain wargear) have powers that work like this in Dawn of War II.
• Church Militant: The Sisters of Battle in Soulstorm. There's also the Imperial Guard Priest, who wields an Eviscerator, improves squad attack power, and can temporarily make the squad he's attached to completely immune to damage.
• Civil Warcraft:
  • In Winter Assault, Gorgutz puts his first WAAAGH! together by destroying the Big Bannerz of the five largest ork clans on Lorn V leading to brief skirmishes with the groups in question, and his army turns on him if Crull beats him to the Gate. In Dark Crusade, his followers likewise turn against him if you destroy their banners during the Ork stronghold mission, and the Eldar stronghold shows that some of his men were lured away by Eldar warlocks to serve as cat's-paws and soften up their enemies in the event that someone attacked their stronghold; Gorgutz can stomp them in kind and persuade some of his men to rejoin the WAAAGH!.
  • In Dark Crusade, the Eldar also manipulate a small Chaos cult to fight their enemies for them. They are opposed to Eliphas' Word Bearer Legion, and you still have to fight them if you play as Chaos.
  • In Chaos Rising, you finally get to fulfill Avitus' dream and smash some traitor Guardsmen (that use equipment identical to that of the loyal Guardsmen).
  • Also in Chaos Rising: one mission has you leading your squads against another company of Blood Ravens. How you choose to handle this can have grave repercussions on your corruption rating.
  • In Retribution, you will be fighting your fellow Space Marines or Imperial Guardsmen who have (knowingly or not) turned traitor by following Kyras, or Eldar forces fighting against other Eldar. Chaos fighting against other Chaos forces and the Freeboota Orks fighting against other Orks won't be marked as a spoiler; Chaos is, after all, Chaos, and it's to be expected that Orks fight each other. The Tyranids also fight against fellow Tyranids at moments when the Hive Mind's control over them is broken.
• Clown Car: Played straight with some transport units in Dawn of War II onwards, which can also reinforce nearby infantry squads. Presumably soldiers are disembarking from the transport to reinforce understrength squads on foot, but those transports never run out of replacements to deploy as necessary unless the player is out of resources.
• Cold Sniper: Besides the Vindicare, Cyrus in Dawn of War II goes into this... though played with in that Cyrus is clearly the most worried character about the Tyranids.
• Colon Cancer: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Winter Assault
• Combat Pragmatist: The Blood Ravens' approach to warfare is very much like those of good RTS players. Unlike the Space Wolves' or Blood Angels' ferocious charges, the Blood Ravens focus on analyzing and targeting weak points in enemy lines, applying pressure where needed to break apart far larger forces with minimal casualties. The best example of this comes from Dawn of War II's campaign, where a strike force consisting of 11 Marines, 3 Scouts, and 1 Dreadnought was able to hold off a sector-wide Tyranid invasion (with Ork infestations and Eldar interventions on top of that) by striking at key targets until the much larger relief force arrives.
• A Commander Is You:
  • Space Marines:
    • Numbers: Balanced, edging slightly towards Elitist. Their squads are expensive, especially the elite ones, but tend to be slightly above-average in every respect.
    • Doctrine: Generalist with a dash of Brute and Loyal. Overall the Space Marines' combat doctrine can be summed up as Boring, but Practical en masse. They're designed for fighting and as such, their various upgrades tend to be a dozen individual upgrades for squads, sergeants, and Commanders that all add up over time. Basic Space Marine squads can be upgraded to be effective against any units, and most of their units feature at least one optional upgrade that lets them realign their weapons output as needed. Sergeants for basic Space Marine and Assault Marine squads also have the Rally! ability that lets them instantly restore their squad's moral and make them immune to morale damage for a time. Their final building gives them the option of sending units anywhere on the battlefield via Drop Pod, but can also train Space Marine squads and Dreadnoughts, letting them send reinforcements directly to the frontline.
  • Eldar:
    • Numbers: Elitist. Their units and buildings are very expensive, and due to their need to build Webway Gates to spread their control area and unlock the right to recruit any units besides their basic troops and Worker Unit, they guzzle Requisition and can take a long time to get going. That being said, their units tend to be very powerful and adaptable once they actually hit the field.
    • Doctrine: Unit Specialist and Technical, with some Ranger and a little Guerrilla. Eldar units tend to be designed for specific roles, e.g. ranged anti-infantry (Guardians, Dark Reapers), melee anti-infantry and disruption (Howling Banshees, Seer Council), ranged anti-vehicle (Fire Dragons, Wraithguard) and so on; within their role they are very dominant bordering on unstoppable, but they struggle hard when taken out of their specific niche. Most Eldar units are also quite fragile, necessitating copious use of speed and stealth, especially in the early game when they are not well-established. Their Webway Gates can be upgraded to help with this in the mid and late-game, providing transportation, healing and stealth options. They can also be used to teleport Eldar structures around the map, though only near another Webway Gate.
  • Chaos: (Renamed Chaos Space Marines in II)
    • Numbers: Balanced overall, with a tug back and forth between Spammer and Elitist. Their units aren't as expensive as their loyalist counterparts but also aren't as adaptable. While their basic unit is the utter chaff Chaos Cultists squad, every other unit is much more cost-prohibitive.
    • Doctrine: Generalist, with a side-order of Guerrilla. They're less adaptable than their loyalist counterparts but still have units that can answer more than one role on the battlefield. In the first game Chaos has less ranged firepower than their loyalist cousins but more close-combat strength. As they tech up, their Chaos Cultists and Chaos Marines can become permanently infiltrated, making them adept at sneaky tactics.
  • Orks:
    • Numbers: Spammer. Ork units are cheap and have above-average size limits, but individual Orks who aren't part of an elite squad tend to be fragile and easily killed.
    • Doctrine: Brute, with elements of Industrial and Gimmick. Orks are reliant on the exploitation of the Orky Population mechanic, which determines their maximum number of boots on the ground and their progress on the Ork tech tree. Orky Pop is raised by building WAAAGH! Banners, with the more of them built allowing more Ork infantry, more powerful Ork squads, and better upgrades and research to improve existing forces. The number of Orks in a unit or large area also determines a squad's movement speed, attack damage, morale recovery, and health regeneration. In fact, a big enough assembly of Ork infantry within a set radius makes every squad immune to morale damage. Orks also have building that self-repair outside of combat and Worker Units that can reinforce to make building them faster, as well as a lower wait time to capture Requisition points that allows them to expand quickly across the entire map.
  • Imperial Guard:
    • Numbers: Spammer for their infantry, Balanced for vehicles. Their squads of ordinary Guardsmen tend to be massive and inexpensive but squishy, while more specialist units serve specific support roles and are tougher but more expensive. Their vehicles meanwhile tend to consist of tough, slow-moving but hard-hitting tanks that dish out a lot of damage while also taking it, and are less numerous and more expensive.
    • Doctrine: Brute/Ranger/Technical, with a bit of Turtle. The Guard have a very defensive playstyle overall, with strong turrets and the ability to garrison their structures and move between them through tunnels (in Game 1) or build cover that their infantry can take to greatly reduce incoming ranged damage (Game 2). The trade-off is that ordinary Guardsmen squads are very fragile and will drop like flies under sustained fire without the benefits of either cover or supporting fire from their powerful tanks and artillery. Their morale for ordinary Guardsmen is also poor before research and if they break, they will stay broken for at least a minute without intervention. Specifically, in Game 1 the player can attach special sub-Commanders to their squads to strengthen their morale and provide benefits. The Commissar can shoot a Guardsman in the squad he's attached to in the head to instantly restore morale to surrounding squads and increase their damage output, while the Priest makes his squad immune to damage and the Psyker drains the morale of a squad he's attached to for his Psychic Powers.
  • Tau Empire:
    • Numbers: Elitist. Most of their units, especially battlesuits, are prohibitively expensive, but Tau units compensate with their powerful ranged attacks while Kroot units boast superior toughness.
    • Doctrine: Ranger/Technical, with a little Gimmick. The Tau are one of two races in the first game (the other being the Orks) who expand their Tech Tree and population caps laterally instead of through direct upgrades at the main structure, and the only race who do so exclusively. Most Tau units, from the lowly Fire Warriors to the Commander himself, are fragile and very weak in melee but compensate with long-range, hard-hitting guns that make for excellent overlapping fields of fire. Due to most Tau also having limited fields of vision they rely on Pathfinder squads and Kroot units to scout ahead for them. Kroot units meanwhile are generally hardier, with Carnivores consuming the flesh of defeated enemies or dead friendly units to increase the health pool of all Carnivore squads present and future to become even tougher, especially under the guidance of a Shaper. The Tau also have a unique branch in their tech tree where they must choose between advancing under the doctrine of Mont'ka (the Killing Blow) or Kauyon (the Patient Hunter), a choice they can only make once per game. Mont'ka provides powerful direct damage Tau units that excel at cracking heavy armour and buildings, while Kauyon provides even hardier Kroot units and research to make the weapons of ordinary Fire Warriors and Steathsuits even more powerful. Most Tau units only have so-so Morale as well, though it can be boosted by summoning an Ethereal. Just make sure the Ethereal doesn't die, or the entire army falls into a Heroic BSoD!
  • Necrons:
    • Numbers: Elitist. Necrons have heavy population demands for squads, with their basic Warriors squad costing 3 Population. To compensate, they are tough to kill and even if they fall, they can re-animate or be collected by Tomb Spyders to be reconstituted as fresh troops.
    • Doctrine: Brute/Turtle/Gimmick. The Necrons operate on a rolling thunder playstyle, whereby they start with a submerged Monolith for a central structure that produces all their units and gradually restore its power while also unlocking new units with supplementary structures and power generators to fund it, ultimately leading to the Monolith emerging from the ground and becoming a slow but mobile unit in its own right that still produces units. Most Necron infantry is the same — hardy, hard-hitting but slow as molasses — but compensate by being able to teleport to owned structures (or in the Necron Lord's case, anywhere at will). The Necrons also don't make use of the Requisition resource, their monolithic Listening Post structures instead increasing their population caps and the rate at which they recruit units, build structures and process research. On the flip side they can build up to ten Power Generators per Monolith, which increase in cost and build time as more are built, though their basic Warrior squad does not require power to build, instead increasing its build time per existing Warriors squad. (Though it still costs Power to reinforce said Warriors squad.) Another big difference is that all combat-capable Necron units cannot capture Requisition points, a duty that instead falls to their Worker Unit of Builder Scarabs, which are also one of their only way to detect Infiltrated units.
  • Sisters of Battle:
    • Numbers: Balanced. Compared to the Space Marines and Imperial Guard, their numbers and costs occupy an in-between phase.
    • Doctrine: Generalist/Technical/Gimmick. Like the Space Marines, the Sisters come with a variety of units that can be re-armed or multi-faceted in their offense. The difference lies in the Sisters' Acts of Faith. By adding Holy Icons to up to five of their Listening Posts, the Sisters can channel their faith into miraculous abilities that include healing, magic bolters and freezing a target enemy squad on the spot. Their Faith is generated at an increased rate the more Commanders, squad leaders and elite units are deployed.
  • Dark Eldar:
    • Numbers: Elitist. The Dark Eldar have similar building and unit costs to their Eldar cousins, with the added disadvantage of generally lower squad sizes. (For instance, the basic Mandrake and Warrior squads max out at six regular members, plus a squad leader for the Warriors; Eldar Guardians get nine members and a Warlock leader.)
    • Doctrine: Technical/Guerrilla/Espionage/Gimmick. The Dark Eldar are designed around raiding and have the stats to match; their ability to absorb damage is limited but they have a variety of tricks and powers that let them lower their enemies' morale and weaken them to aid their own survival while also strengthening their own damage with poison and other devious weapons. Their main transport, the Raider, lets the squad it's carrying shoot from inside to deal additional damage while providing cover. The Dark Eldar are also the only race who can build their vehicle building without constructing an infantry building, or even rising above tech level one, which can give them an edge in the early game where most races are locked out of anti-vehicle weapons and units. Another major difference is that their Worker Unit does not need to constantly attend structures to build them; instead, Slaves can activate a structure and let it build on its own, which makes it easier to build quickly and also allows them to gather soul essence from the battlefield to use various nefarious abilities.
  • Tyranids: (Game 2 Only)
    • Numbers: Spammer for lowly basic units (Hormagaunts and Termagaunts), slightly closer to Balanced for elite Synapse creatures like Warriors. Just like in the lore, Tyranids have meat to spare.
    • Doctrine: Brute/Gimmick. The Tyranids' main difference compared to all the other races is their Synapse mechanic, whereby basic and weaker Tyranid units receive boosts to their health, damage resistance and damage output when in the presence of specific elite creatures, from their commanders to specific units like Warriors and Zoanthropes. In practical terms this means the player is encouraged to have large hordes of smaller units that travel in concert with a single support creature to increase their damage output.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • On "Harder" and "Insane" Skirmish difficulties the computer doesn't really get any smarter, it just gets bonuses to its resource acquisition rates. On "Hard" campaign difficulty, the computer gets extra HP on its units, although both are reversed in favor of the player in "Easy" or "Standard" for Skirmish and "Easy" or "Normal" for the campaign. This was done because Jonny Ebert, lead designer of ''Dawn of War II'', believes that allowing the computer to cheat is necessary to close the gap between them and the player(s)...
  • The Imperial Guard scanner has an uncanny ability to always hit infiltrators dead on, despite the fact they're, y'know, invisible. Even if you don't have any infiltrators to unveil, the scanner will always land on some of your units or buildings no matter how low the chances are to do so with a Hail Mary shot.
  • Honor Guard units in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm can only be earned by conquering and holding territory, and getting all 12 units requires conquering everything that doesn't confer a strategic bonus instead. That's the rule for the player. AI generals don't need to conquer or hold anything at all. They simply gain one unit per turn even if they never make it out of their stronghold, including units like heavy tier 3 tanks that the player can never have in their Honor Guard. This can lead to extremely nasty surprises when an AI player sits tight and quiet for a while and then suddenly steamrolls your provinces with an unstoppable Honor Guard full of powerful elite units that charge your HQ before you've even had a chance to build some basic infantry.
  • The Tau are the only faction in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm without access to stationary defenses other than their listening posts, which prevents Tau players from applying the game-breaking fortification techniques that make province defense missions a joke. However, if the AI controls the Tau, it can build listening posts absolutely anywhere, not just on control points and relics, and it's depressingly common to attack a Tau base and find it walled in by about a dozen upgraded "listening posts".
• Conspiracy Redemption: The 'pure' ending of Chaos Rising flat-out states that this will be happening to the Blood Ravens. This being Warhammer 40,000, the ensuing civil war will probably cripple the chapter beyond recovery, but hey.
• Construct Additional Pylons: Averted from Dawn of War II onwards (you only ever have the HQ building you start with), but in earlier games, certain support structures need to be constructed to raise the unit cap during gameplay for most factions.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In Dawn of War II various nods are made to the Kronus campaign, which Tarkus, Avitus and Captain Thule were all involved in: Thule now has a scar on his face and is missing one eye, an injury he received while fighting the Necron Lord of Kronus; Avitus can gain a Heavy Bolter which references the battle at Victory Bay against the Imperial Guard, and this battle is part of the reason he hates Guardsmen so much (because he had friends who died there); Tarkus got his scars while fighting a Tomb Spyder, when he stuck a grenade in its mouth and let it go off. Chaos Rising also notes Eliphas' ultimate fate, and Tarkus describes him as having been a "supremely cunning" opponent.
  • In the Space Marine campaign of Retribution, there is a Thunder Hammer called 'Hammer of the Nameless'. Its description implies that this was the weapon the Force Commander used to banish Ulkair.
  • If you defeat the Eldar as the Blood Ravens in Dark Crusade, the narrator notes that the Blood Ravens have had to deal with Eldar machinations before, both in the first game on Tartarus, then in the novels on Rahe's Paradise.
  • Hints at Taldeer's prophecy which compelled her to act against the Necrons during Dark Crusade are mentioned in more detail in the Eldar campaign in Retribution.
  • The Imperial Guard campaign in Retribution has some wargear referring to Imperial Guard commanders from the previous games, namely the Hand of the Governor-Militant, Alexander's Livery (both from Governor-Militant Lukas Alexander from Dark Crusade) and the Shield of Sturnn (from General Sturnn from Winter Assault).
  • The hostile Space Marine, Eldar, Ork and Chaos forces encountered in Retribution's campaigns are primarily from the same subfactions as the ones present in the campaign of the very first Dawn of War (Blood Ravens, Biel-Tan, Bad Moonz and Alpha Legion, respectively).
  • Several units in Dawn of War II and its expansions have some dialogue from the original game. Chaos Heretics even get the iconic "We captured it for Chaos!" albeit stripped of the Narm.
  • Even something as simple as the description of a multiplayer map from Dawn of War gets referenced. Avitus' backstory notes he first met Davian Thule while battling the Chaos Witch Morgana, which directly refers to the rather popular Skirmish map "Fata Morgana".
• Cooldown Manipulation: Most hero units' ability cooldowns can be reduced by around 20 percent with the Veteran and Hero upgrades.
  • The Imperial Command Squad has a variation: it can have one general and up to four Psykers/Priests/Commissars (five if the general dies and is replaced), having multiples of the same unit doesn't affect the global cooldown (so you can cast the same ability up to five times in a row before the actual cooldown sets in). This seems like just a gimmick, but if you stack five Priests, and time their invincibility just right, you can prevent that unit from ever being damaged. It's poor form, but it's war.
  • If an Eldar Farseer is attached to a Seer Council, her cooldowns are shortened (stacking with the Hero and Veteran upgrades).
  • Every Incubus added to a Dark Eldar Archon's retinue reduces his abilities' cooldowns by 10%.
  • The Dark Eldar have the Rekindle Rage soul power, which resets a single unit's cooldowns (does not work with the soul powers' cooldowns, obviously).
  • Some characters in Dawn of War II have abilities that completely negate the cooldown of others for a short period.
• Corrupted Contingency: Blood Ravens Chapter Master turned traitor Azariah Kyras manipulated the Inquisition, more specifically the Ordo Malleus, into performing an exterminatus on sub-sector Aurelia in order to use the resulting deaths and destruction to become a daemon prince. Lord Eliphas the Inheritor appropriated the plan at the end of the Chaos campaign.
• Covers Always Lie: It's impossible to equip any of your Space Marines like the one in the box art for Dawn of War II. Thunder Hammers and Bolters can't be equipped together (or with any other weapons for that matter), the only character who can even use Thunder Hammers is the Force Commander and he never wears a helmet in the base game. And to top it all off, when you finally get a helmet you can equip him with in Chaos Rising it's a different color.
• Critical Existence Failure: Played straight as an arrow throughout the series. Justified in the case of Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines, as their augmented physiology and decades of training will keep them up and fighting until a mortal blow is struck. Also justified in the case of daemonic units like Bloodthirsters, Bloodletters and the Avatar of Khaine, who are maintained with a warp presence, and once they take a certain amount of damage, their otherwise unharmed physical bodies simply fall apart.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Normally avoided as described in the article but most units have a clear preference of using either melee weapons or guns and won't survive long when fighting in the wrong element. For a demonstration of this, try winning a firefight with Khorne Berserkers or Nobz, or a melee with Dark Reapers or Fire Warriors.
  • Faction-wise, Tau units can destroy nearly anything from afar, but don't last long in melee. While they do have auxiliaries decent at melee, they're not quite as good as the equivalent melee units of the other factions.
    • The Imperial Guard is in the same boat, more or less. Guardsmen squads have good firepower, especially once they have been fully upgraded, as do Kasrkin, but the former are quite poor at melee, and the latter are only a little better. Furthermore, unlike other factions, the Guard has no vehicles that are any good at melee; whereas, say, the Eldar have the Wraithlord, and the Imperial Space Marines have the Dreadnought, the Guard Walker, the Sentinel, is only good at anti-vehicle ranged. The Guard, therefore, has only two units that are any good at melee: one single Ogryn squad, and the single command squad, especially if it has a lot of priests. Pretty much the only time you want to use the Guard in melee is against the Tau.
  • The Eldar Infantry of Dawn of War are almost a pure embodiment of this trope. Come Winter Assault, however, this was no longer the case.
  • Several vehicles in Dawn of War give you the option of upgrading their weapons. They usually start with a set of weapons made for the same target (Anti-Infantry for the Chaos Predator, Anti-Tank for the Ravager) that can be upgraded to do the opposite (lascannons for anti-tank on the Predator, Splinter Cannons for anti-infantry on the Ravager). This allows the players to choose if all of the weapons are specialized against one target, or if they want to bring a balanced mix. The upside and downside of course is that there isn't enough of these units for you to bring an even mix that is also effective, but overspecializing leads to the usual problems.
• Crosshair Aware:
  • Tau missile barrages leave a big honking crosshair on the ground.
  • Off-map support like artillery barrages or drop pods in the second game usually leave a marker on the ground before they trigger, as do most special boss attacks.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Doesn't usually apply, considering that everyone in the 40K universe is inherently badass to a degree. But Martellus, a minor character from Dawn of War II, earns special mention by becoming a major character in Chaos Rising. In the first game, the most he ever did was pilot Thunderhawk Two to deploy power generators and Tarantula sentry guns for you. In Chaos Rising, it turns out he actually survived the final battle against the Tyranids and held his own against Ork looters for at least a year. If none of your other squad leaders become corrupted he turns to Chaos and serves as That One Boss by driving a huge and powerful tank - which he probably built himself, considering he's a Techmarine. According to Retribution, this is not Canon and Martellus goes on to become a playable character in the Space Marine campaign.
• Cruel Mercy: Kaptin Bluddflagg refuses to kill Adrastia at the end of the Ork campaign in Retribution. While she is happy about this, not being thought worth fighting is the worst insult in Ork culture. He did steal her hat, though.
• Culture Clash: In Dawn of War II, this is brought up by Administrator Derosa when you first arrive on Meridian.
  Administrator Derosa: This is not the hinterlands of Calderis or Typhon, Commander, so a certain amount of discretion would be appreciated.
• Crucified Hero Shot: The pilot of the Sisters of Battle Penitent Engine is constantly in this position. Given that it's the Sisters of Battle, this is probably not a coincidence.
• Cutscene: Mostly using the in-game engine, but there are CGI cinematics at the beginning of both games and some of the expansions.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: For the first DOW, during the mission where the Land Raiders are introduced, there'll be a number of scripted battles before you can do anything. One of these has an Assault Squad jump to a location where they will be ambushed by a squad of Possessed Marines. The Assault Squad will be eating so much pavement while Possessed Marines would be considered unlucky if they lose a single man. You can prevent the Assault Squad from getting completely massacred if you take manual control of the survivors and flee long enough for your jetpacks to get ready for a jump out of there.
• Cutscene Power to the Max:
  • Oh, how the intro cutscenes are guilty of this, except in Dawn of War II, which plays out almost exactly like some multiplayer matches might feel.
  • When sync killing, units show abilities not normally seen (like Tau guns being rapid-fire, Boom, Headshot!, etc.).
  • Army sizes are also inflated in the in-game cutscenes, with multiple copies of supposedly-unique units showing up - for instance, when Chaos defeats the Space Marines in Dark Crusade, two or three Obliterator squads appear, despite the fact that the game only allows you to have one such squad in your army.
• Cutscene Incompetence: Some hilarious examples.
  • In the Tau Stronghold Intro of Dark Crusade, the only faction that can single-handedly defeat the defenders are the Orks.
  • When you defeat the Eldar Stronghold as the Imperial Guard in Dark Crusade, you are treated to a scripted fight-scene of their Avatar of Khaine losing to, of all things, a Sentinel.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Though the first entry and III have linear endings, the rest have faction-specific endings which were declared canon by following works:
  • Winter Assault: The Eldar ending. Farseer Taldeer led the Ulthwe warhost to victory against the forces of Disorder, the Sturnn's Imperial Guard and the Necrons of Lorn V, destroyed the Titan and left the planet. Only War by Fantasy Flight Games confirms the Eldar victory and Sturnn's death at their hands.
  • Dark Crusade: The Space Marines ending. The Blood Ravens successfully purged Kronus to preserve their chapter's secrets. Davian Thule's forces were confirmed to have had a hand in beating the Necrons, the Chaos Space Marines, the Imperial Guard and the Eldar. Tactical Sergeant Tarkus and Devastator Sergeant Avitus were part of this campaign, with Tarkus losing an arm but gaining Terminator Honours after destroying a Tomb Spyder by shoving a grenade inside it and letting it go off while he was still holding it, while Avitus developed an increased disdain for the Imperial Guard because several Marines he called friend were killed during the siege of Victory Bay. The whole affair cast suspicion upon the Blood Ravens.
  • Soulstorm: The Ork ending. Gorgutz 'Ead 'Unter won control of the Kauvara system and his Boyz transformed the entire system into the a massive breeding ground and construction complex, setting the stage for his next conquest. The Blood Ravens under Captain Indrick Boreale suffered a crippling blow in defeat, with three entire companies lost as a result. Scout Sergeant Cyrus, who was part of this venture, began to resent certain members of the Blood Ravens command staff as a result of Captain Boreale's incompetence and unwillingness to listen to him, whle the chapter in general considers the conflict a blight on their history.
  • Chaos Rising: While the fate of the Force Commander and Assault Sergeant Thaddeus is up in the air, it is clear the force in general did not fall to Chaos or join the Black Legion. Avitus was the traitor, and Tarkus took a vow of silence to deal with the guilt of killing his friend.
  • Retribution: The Blood Ravens ending, with a bit of the Eldar ending as well. Some surviving Blood Ravens in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine confirm the chapter is alive, while III shows that Rohnan successfully recovered Taldeer's soulstone.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul:
  • Subverted: When Davian Thule is revived as a Dreadnought, he initially misidentifies teammates, believes he is fighting somewhere else, and is nearly catatonic outside of combat. This is not because of the cybernetics, however, but because he's delirious from a nearly fatal dose of Tyranid venom. Later in the game, he returns to mostly normal (mostly, since for some reason he has to....pause frequently...when he...speaks).
  • Played straight with Thomas Macabee, a.k.a. the Necron Pariah spokesman from Dark Crusade.
• Cyborg: One upgrade for the Space Marines is a set of bionic augmentations.
  • In II, Cyrus has an artificial right eye. General Castor has a cybernetic arm that lets him dual-weld with guns that are supposed to be two-handers in one hand, and a sword in the other. An upgrade for the Ork Warboss is "Cybork Bitz".
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In Dawn of War II, squads deployed in a mission are automatically assigned numerical hotkeys (which the player can override if desired) and placed in positions on a unit selection bar on the right side of the screen (which the player cannot override.) Typically, four player chosen squads are deployed to any given mission. However, there are times when a particular mission might deploy specific squads instead of player chosen ones, or other squads might deploy mid-mission which the player then gets command of. This can be difficult when the player usually assigns certain squads to certain hotkeys and expects them to occupy specific slots on the unit selection bar, confusing the control scheme somewhat.
• Dancing Mook Credits: Dawn of War has a showcase of the various Finishing Moves in the credits.
• Danger Deadpan : The Chaos Hell Talon from Soulstorm always talks like this, sounding like a servitor, rather than screaming loudly like every other Chaos unit. Amusingly, this is because it is piloted by a servitor according to its fluff from the Imperial Armor books.
• Dark Secret: The Blood Ravens have a motto, "Knowledge is power, guard it well." They fulfill this, first by having a scholarly bent that drives them to seek out and record information, particularly as relates to the lost knowledge of their chapter's origins, and second by guarding that information jealously, hence a great deal of secrecy. In particular, some of the uncovered knowledge about their chapter is implied to be things that the Blood Ravens would rather nobody know. Captain Thule, for example, found relics and information about the early days of the chapter on Kronus, which he promptly destroyed and would share with no one except Captain Angelos.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Gabriel Angelos in the original game:
    Gabriel: [standing in front of a Chaos altar] So the good Inquisitor senses no Chaos here. How fortunate for the Imperium that such keen-eyed eagles stand vigil over her gates...
  • Sindri, of course, is not to be outdone either.
    Sindri: Have faith. Have I led you astray... thus far?
    Bale: No. But if you fail me in this...
    Sindri: Yes, yes, then my suffering will be great. Just be ready to move when I instruct.
    [slightly later]
    Bale: SINDRI!!!
    Sindri: [audibly annoyed] WHAT?! ...my lord?
  • Taldeer in Dark Crusade:
    Thule: The Blood Ravens will not be driven back by one such as you!
    Taldeer: Take solace at least in facing defeat at the hands of your betters. There is no dishonour in that.
    Thule: We have yet to meet our betters, alien, certainly not on this forsaken world! All we have seen here are tyrants, heretics and alien scum.
    Taldeer: You should have looked beyond your mirror then.
  • As good as Taldeer is, she can't hold a candle to Eliphas:
    Eliphas: What a rousing little speech, Governor. Unfortunately, your False Emperor can't touch us here.
    Alexander: Cleansing the Imperium of filth like you will be a pleasure.
    Eliphas: Oh, I assure you: the pleasure will be all mine.
  • Also:
    Thule: You won't hold that for long, daemon-spawn!
    Eliphas: Daemon-spawn? One so hopelessly ignorant of his origins should not be so quick to insult another's parentage, "brother".
    Thule: We are not brothers, heretic.
    Eliphas: [chuckles] Of course not. My mistake.
  • And:
    Thule: This fortress shall not fall!
    Eliphas: Such inspiring courage. Perhaps we'll mount your corpse on a golden chair and make an idol out of you as well.
    Thule: You pile heresy upon heresy, traitor! How could the Emperor have ever trusted trash like you?!
    Eliphas: Wonder instead how we ever could have trusted one such as him, brother.
  • Avitus takes this role in the team in Dawn of War II. Most of his lines are one-liners of various kinds, most of them snarky as Warp.
    Avitus: [Upon defeating a Tyranid brood threatening the already small population of Typhon] Those who fear death can emerge from beneath their beds now.
  • Every Eldar character from Retribution seems to be in competition to find out who’s the snarkiest, although Ronahn definitely takes the biscuit. Taldeer's brother is almost as snarky as she was.
    Veldoran: This is the transmission, much good may it do you. Human communication is not far removed from shouting.
    Kayleth: So then, Ronahn, let us see how your mastery of subterfuge stands to solve this riddle with but one victory on Meridian.
    Ronahn: Even now, Kyras' response is likely on-route. But it's encoding may not be as primitive or easily-heard from afar. We strike here, at the source of the message. Slay them all. Then, we wait dutifully for Kyras' message to arrive.
    Kayleth: Hmmm... Deviously efficient, probable success, and an immediate egress. Well plotted.
    Veldoran: Yes, we are fortunate your years of running have gifted you with some wit.
    Ronahn: Do remember your ancestry, Veldoran. The only Eldar that live to this day are the ones who ran.
  • The Tau's Kroot Carnivores.
    Kroot Carnivores: [Upon capturing a strategic point] OK, your little flag is up. Now what?
    Kroot Carnivores: [Ordered to move to new position] Oh, you want me over there now, do you?
• Deal with the Devil: According to lore, the entire Chaos Marines faction, but to be more specific:
  • Tarkus at least thinks he made one with Ulkair, if he's the traitor.
  • Eliphas asks Ulkair for aid in fighting the Blood Ravens. Ulkair decides he's up for a bit of fun, since while all the Traitor Guardsmen could offer him was rotten meat and worship, Eliphas is being proactive in spreading death and decay (and since Eliphas has already made a Faustian deal with Abbadon the Despoiler, Ulkair can't have him).
• Death Is Cheap:
  • Eliphas the Inheritor has canonically been killed at least twice, neither of which stuck. He's offed a third time in the Space Marine campaign of Retribution, but that probably won't stick, either.
  • Killing a Hive Tyrant or another vital or large Tyranid creature will disrupt a Tyranid swarm and cost the Hive Fleet valuable biomass. They'll just keep making more large Tyranids to replace them. Very true for the smaller Tyranids.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: While really hard to do, possible from Dawn of War II onwards. Very upsetting should your Terminators get offed by mere Shoota Boyz via Scratch Damage, although it is very easy to retreat from them.
  • The setting is, ironically enough, one of the few places were this trope actually makes sense, as exploding rocket-propelled bullets and high-powered lasers are standard-issue sidearms for at least three factions.
  • Considering the ridiculous amounts of health the final bosses of Chaos Rising and Retribution have, this is probably what you do to them.
  • Daisy the Battlewagon in Retribution is definitely going to have you performing this trope on it, since it has almost as much health as the Final Boss. Luckily, it doesn't do as much damage (and helpfully indicates where and when it makes its big attacks) and isn't periodically invulnerable.
• Death from Above:
  • Assault Marines (who even shout "Death from above!" when they deploy), and their Ork Stormboy/Chaos Raptor counterparts. Equipped with: pistol, melee weapon, jump-pack, and berzerker rage.
  • Artillery units like Imperial Guard Basilisks or Space Marine Whirlwinds.
  • Some Commanders can call in bombardment of some sort.
  • Soulstorm adds aircraft to each races, which are still capable of hitting ground targets.
  • Dawn of War II and its expansions have a particularly nasty one in form of Tankbustaz, who, if none of your units are in their line of sight but some of them are in a certain range, will rain down rokkitz upon your head until you can engage them directly. One of these tucked away in a hard-to-reach place while you are beset by enemies can easily make a battle much harder.
  • Terminator squads in Dawn of War II onwards can be equipped with Cyclone missile launchers, allowing them to rain down a powerful missile barrage on enemy heads. They keep all their other weapons and armor, so they can still slaughter units without using it.
  • The 'Skyleap' ability for Autarch Kayleth in Retribution.
  • Instead of the Basilisk, the Imperial Guard has the Manticore in Retribution. It can fire 4 missiles, which are all targeted individually within a small area.
• Death Seeker: As with the general 40K lore, Dreadnoughts are honored to continue to serve the Emperor in death. Chaos Dreadnoughts, on the other hand, feel imprisoned in their walking tombs and beg for death. This is to the point that a Chaos player's announcer will report one's death as "A Dreadnought has escaped into death."
  • Plague Marines, when ordered to retreat respond with "NO!... Death is so close..."
• Decapitated Army:
  • The "Assassinate" victory condition.
  • The Tau are a hardcore shooty army, complete with Mini Mechas, that will completely give up, retreat and abandon the entire freaking campaign if you can kill their Ethereal in their stronghold mission. By the time you fight your way past all the invisible units, heavy long-ranged firepower and rapid redeployment idiocy, the Ethereal makes for an incredibly underwhelming fight.
• Defector from Decadence: In Chaos Rising, part of the Blood Ravens' third and fourth companies rebel against their tainted chapter master. If Avitus was the traitor, which canonically, he is, he expresses similar sentiments as a reason for his actions.
• Defenseless Transports: The Space Marine Rhino APC doesn't have guns, but it does have a smoke grenade launcher. Note that in the source material Rhinos are armed. And even in Dawn of War there are other, armed APCs (for example, the Space Marines' Land Raider super-heavy tank doubles as a troop transport).
• Degraded Boss: The Daemon Prince (Final Boss of the first game) returns in Dark Crusade as an upgrade to the Chaos Lord, with about four times less HP and half the size.
• Demonic Head Shake: One Idle Animation for Chaos Space Marines and Khornate Berserkers has their head start shaking uncontrollably.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  Eliphas: Soulless automatons! You cannot prevail against Chaos!
  Necron Lord: [whispers]
  Eliphas: It... your soul is gone. I will destroy you!
• Didn't See That Coming: Idranel knew the Blood Ravens would attempt to prevent her from destroying Angel Forge while weakened from Tarkus having had to stay behind to protect chapter relics from Ork looters. Unfortunately for her, she didn't count on Tarkus' squad showing up wearing said relics on their person. Said relics being Terminator Armor.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Cyrus. Mastering him seems to be required to beat Primarch. Bringing him along makes the last Calderis mission in Chaos Rising MUCH easier if you want to remain pure.
  • It seems like the Eldar were designed to be this — their units can deal incredible damage, but only if you know how to use them right.
• The Ditz: The Ogryn, if their selection/order quotes and general battlefield chatter are anything to go by.^note Fortunately for the Imperial Guard, what they lack in brains they overcompensate in brute strength and durability, resulting in some of the toughest troops in multiplayer.
  Ogryn: Sir, yes... uhh... sir!
  Ogryn: [after killing an Ork unit] Bye bye, Ork!
  Ogryn: [after capturing a strategic point] We got the, uh... [Beat] thing!
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Averted. All but the heaviest weapons can be fired on the move, but expect sharp accuracy drops. The Seraphim unit is notable for not running, but flying while firing Guns Akimbo, and doing it more accurately than anyone else possibly could.
  • Ironically inverted by Avitus, the heavy weapons specialist, and the only Space Marine character (in Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising) with a sprint ability. He can't fire while doing this, of course.
  • A trait that Tarkus can learn allows him to avert this with special weapons like Plasma Guns, though it's still not very accurate.
• Don't You Like It?:
  • In II, you can find a Frost Axe intended as a gift for Ragnar Blackmane, who turned it down. The implication being it was an intentionally poor gift so the Blood Ravens could ask to have it if he didn't want it.
  • In Retribution, your army must defeat a Khornate Champion who is furious that you're so rude as to turn down Khyras' "gift" of being on Typhon as it's being nuked into space dust.
• Dual Wielding: Seraphim squads and Death Cult Assassins use twin bolt pistols and katanas respectively. The Kroot Shaper uses two blades in melee.
• Dub Name Change: The French version renames the Dark Eldar Archon to Great Voivod, since Archon is already used for Eldar Warlocks. And the Reaver Jetbikes are renamed Raptor Jetbikes despite Raptors already being used for the Chaos unit.
• Dub Pronunciation Change: In the French dub, Lord Bale's name is now pronounced the same as Baal, while O'Kais (Oh-Ka-Ees) now sounds like the word "Okay".
• Dynamic Entry:
  • In Dawn of War II, the Blood Ravens have decided that using their drop pods to squash Orks is absolutely hilarious, and take every opportunity to do so.
  • The Assault Marine squad has the "combat jump" ability, which allows them to Goomba Stomp enemy infantry.

E - G

• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • In the original Dawn of War campaign, squads of Imperial Guardsmen and the Leman Russ tank appeared in some missions and were even playable in four of them; that was before they became a full-fledged playable faction in Winter Assault. Similarly, the Necrons made a non-playable appearance as enemies in the final mission (for either side) in Winter Assault, a full expansion pack before they became playable in Dark Crusade.
  • Before the release of Chaos Rising, Dawn of War II received a new game mode called "The Last Stand". Those who managed the feat of reaching the final wave would find themselves facing a Chaos Lord and Bloodletters, which would not make an appearance until Chaos Rising.
• Early Game Hell:
  • The campaigns of Dark Crusade and Soulstorm. You start out with only a hero and a single builder unit and no resources, with honor guard and defensive units added at great cost, so it's not unusual to spend a turn or two doing nothing to accumulate enough requisition to survive an attack, while enemy heroes start maps with full squads and immediately go for your HQ.
  • The Chaos Rising campaign is a weird case. Its first mission is fairly relaxed overall, as are more or less all others from the third onwards, but its second mission is absolutely brutal even on the lowest difficulty setting. Your most powerful asset, Dreadnought Davian Thule, gets replaced by the not particularly useful Glass Cannon Jonah Orion after the first minor skirmish. Then you must fight through a map that is crawling with top-tier Eldar units including their devastating Fire Prism Hover Tanks that get endlessly reinforced from a base in the far north. Once you cut off these reinforcements, you must rush all the way back to the starting point under a very tight time limit while even worse Eldar units with Cycle of Hurting abilities try to prevent you from doing just that, and once (if) you arrive, you have to fight another major battle against more alien armor and elite infantry. Talk about being thrown in the deep end. It's exceedingly difficult to make it through this mission with a good rating due to how easy it is to lose squad leaders to ridiculous enemy firepower.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Among other things, the original Dawn of War let you have four Land Raiders, equip Ork mobs with anti-everything weaponry and have armies consisting entirely of high-end units. There was also no (relative) limit to the size of Ork squads, meaning that even squads of Nobz could be up to 15 strong, not counting Leaders. It also let you deploy however many turrets you felt you could get away with. Relic/Specialist units and turrets gained caps when Dark Crusade was released.
  • For the sake of simplifying the animation work in Dawn of War I, all characters are right-handed (they always use guns or melee with their right-hand). This is highly unusual as characters who wield a pistol and a melee weapon at the same time are implied to be left-handed (they're supposed to use the melee weapon with their strong, dominant arm instead of their weak, non-dominant arm).
  • In a franchise-wide sense, the Necrons in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm follow their original characterization as Terminators in space, robotic undead purging all life in the galaxy on behalf of their C'tan masters. Their 2011 tabletop revamp gave them more distinct personalities and an Ancient Egypt motif, with more intelligent leaders ruling rival "dynasties", while the C'tan are reduced to a fraction of their power, having been overthrown by the Necrons. As such, the Necrons in Retribution follow their post-revamp characterization.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Maintaining full purity in Chaos Rising is necessary to get the Golden Ending, and by the Emperor, this game will make you earn that ending. You'll have to accomplish essentially every optional objective during the campaign, some of which are punishingly hard, or require very specific character deployments. As the cherry on top of the pain sundae, the traitor is revealed to be Martellus, who is quite possibly the hardest boss in the game since he faces you at the wheel of a Chaos Predator and rushes you with Dreadnoughts, which means this path results in you facing 3 of the hardest bosses in the entire series.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The events of Retribution are kicked off when the Inquisition plans on performing Exterminatus on the whole of sub-sector Aurelia after 10 years of indecisive battles. As most 40K players know, this is a wee bit unpleasant for those still on the surface of a planet subjected to it. Each campaign has stopping the Exterminatus (or hijacking the Big Bad's plan for using it, in the Chaos campaign) as a high priority, though for varying reasons. All of them have you get suckered into speeding it up, and having to make a daring escape from Typhon Primaris while the initial stages of Exterminatus are being carried out.
  • Cyrene before the events of Dawn of War, thanks to Captain Angelos. Mentioned again, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it manner, in the sub-sector map in the intro to the Dawn of War II campaign. Which pays off in a Book Ends ending in Retribution.
• Easy Level Trick: Enemy forces in Dark Crusade always spawn in the exact same locations both in capital assaults and in regular provinces. Once you've figured these out, most of the campaign becomes trivial due to options this behavior opens up. The most obvious one is to simply make a beeline for the enemy HQ buildings the moment the mission starts, defeating the enemy before they can build up their forces. Another, even better approach is to trap the enemy in their base (most starting positions only have one or two narrow entrances), conquer the entire map, max out your tech tree, build turrets around the enemy base entrances, then destroy the HQ. Buildings remain on the map when you leave, and if the province is attacked later, you already own the whole map while the enemy either can't leave their base at all or suffers horrendous casualties in the attempt, slowing them down enough for you to move in with minimal fuss. Just be careful not to build too close to the enemy base - it has an "Instant Death" Radius of sorts that will remove any of your buildings inside the perimeter.
• Eating the Enemy: Squiggoths and Greater Knarlocs from avert this: while many of their melee animations show them chomping down on enemies, they don't actually eat them, just toss their corpses far off (in canon, of course, it's a different matter).
• Egopolis:
  • The Lands of Solitude are renamed Borealum in the Space Marine ending of Soulstorm.
  • In the Imperial Guard campaign of Soulstorm, the Roklaw Mountains are renamed Stubbs' Peak.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Elite squads for each faction, such as Terminator Space Marines and Imperial Guard Kasrkin and Ogryns. They have limits imposed on their numbers from Dark Crusade, but one or two of these squads is often all you need to turn the tide of a battle in your favour.
  • Honour Guard units from Dark Crusade, Soulstorm and Retribution play the trope straighter. In the first two, Honour Guard squads and vehicles are unlocked by holding certain territories on the map and bought with Planetary Requisition. They have lower squad numbers than their regular counterparts, but have better stats and don't contribute to their respective population caps. In Retribution, each playable hero has a corresponding Honour Guard unit who can replace them in the field. These units often get secondary benefits from choosing particular abilities for their counterpart hero, are free to replace if they die, have short build times and as above, don't contribute to the population cap; in fact, choosing them increases the population cap by 10 each.
• Enclosed Extraterrestrials: The only Tau unit without a face-concealing helmet is the Ethereal, who wears robes anyway.
• Endless Winter:
  • Lorn V in Winter Assault is an Ice World, so naturally the only place not covered in ice is where Chaos set fire to it. Crull and his men hate it.
  • Chaos Rising stated that before the Warp Storms claimed planet Aurelia, it was a major commerce hub and home to a monastery to the Blood Ravens. When it finally returned to real-space after a millenium in the Warp, it has turned into a wintry wasteland thanks to the ruinous powers in the Warp. And because the Warp separated it from the system's sun.
• Enemy Civil War: Happens in numerous spots of the games.
  • Destroying the Big Bannerz in the Ork Stronghold mission from Dark Crusade causes all of the Orks to turn on one another.
  • The beginning of the Disorder campaign in Winter Assault has Gorgutz and a number of other Ork bosses battling each other as Gorgutz brings the boyz all under his heel. Ironically, he wins by destroying all the Big Bannerz of the other Ork clans, the same tactic he tried in Dark Crusade.
  • The Eldar Stronghold in Dark Crusade has this if you attack them as Chaos or Orks, as Taldeer lures Feral Orks from Gorgutz' Waaagh! and a schismatic Chaos cult led by a mouthy Sorcerer to divide and weaken your forces.
  • Tyranids in Dawn of War II will go feral and fight each other for a bit if a synapse creature like a Warrior or Zoanthrope is killed nearby.
  • Dark Crusade and Soulstorm have inter-Imperium infighting, with Space Marines and Imperial Guard then Space Marines, Imperial Guard and Sisters of Battle respectively.
    • In the case of Dark Crusade, the Blood Ravens and the 1st Kronus Regiment are deployed separately to the same planet with conflicting orders: the Blood Ravens are there to purge the planet in order to protect their chapter's secrets, while the Imperial Guard are there to reclaim the planet for the Imperium, as well as hunting down Farseer Taldeer for her actions on Lorn V. Captain Thule and Governor Alexander offer each other the chance to withdraw when attacking each other's strongholds, not wanting to fight each other, but their mutual determination to follow their superiors' orders prevents them from accepting.
• Enemy Exchange Program: Possessing enemy vehicles with Necron Lord Destroyers. In Dark Crusade the Necron stronghold features a Beacon of the Void Dragon which can replicate the effect.
  • The Chaos Sorcerer possessing Guardsmen in Winter Assault, luring them to the sacrificial Blood Pits in one mission from the Disorder campaign, which is later done again with enthralled Imperial psykers. These parts are made annoying by the fact that, once possessed, they can be targeted by enemy units, and will be.
  • One of the Essence of the Deceiver's abilities is this, but in this instance it's temporary.
• Enemy Mine:
  • In both Dawn of War and Winter Assault, the Imperial forces temporarily ally with the Eldar. In Retribution, Inquisitor Adrastia is willing to enlist the help of the Eldar and hire Bluddflagg on as a mercenary in order to prevent the Exterminatus.
  • In Dark Crusade's Imperial Guard stronghold, killing Commissar Gebbet causes one of their companies to mutiny and ally with you. The Space Marines reward them appropriately while giving an official commendation to those of the loyalists who fought and survived.
• Escaped from Hell: Azariah Kyras was on the Space Hulk Judgement of Carrion when it was sucked back into the Warp. He spent centuries in there, fighting daemons and other horrors, and when it returned to realspace he was rescued and became Chief Librarian and Chapter Master of the Blood Ravens. Shame he only survived by turning to Chaos while in there.
• Epic Fail: In Soulstorm, the Alpha Legion after action reports have the banner of the Word Bearers legion. One of the more clear indications on how unfinished the game was and how deep Iron Lore was in it's dire straits when it was handling development of the game.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • At the end of the Chaos stronghold mission in Dark Crusade, Eliphas claims to his Daemon Prince master that he lost the battle because his men weren't good enough to defeat the enemy. The Daemon is not fooled, spotting immediately that Eliphas is just pointing the finger at his followers to avoid responsibility for his own failure; he is disgusted by this.
    Daemon Prince: It is a poor shepherd who blames his flock, Apostle.
  • Regardless of who the traitor is in Chaos Rising, he freely gives Eliphas the vox codes for his company, but also explicitly tells Eliphas not to use the vox to set up an ambush, saying that if he does, their agreement will be over.
  • Orks see Chaos Marines as a thundering horde of "mean craziez". This is from a species that considers chopping/shooting up your family and friends in front of you hilarious, by the way.
• Everything Fades: Corpses will disappear with time; in the first game, there is an option to avert this by turning on "persistent corpses", and in the expansions, some factions can use fallen bodies to their advantage. This option was removed in Dawn of War II to save on memory.
• Eviler than Thou: Often the motivation for evil factions to clash with each other, as per the source material.
• Evil Is Easy: The selling point of the Chaos Rising expansion to Dawn of War 2 is the player choice between having their troops stay loyal to the Imperium or join the Ruinous Powers instead. While the former does have a few merits (some very powerful equipment, and you don't lose two of your seven squads as the story progresses), the latter offers gear and abilities so hilariously overpowered that only the toughest superbosses still pose a real challenge. Most missions become easier to play as well because the path that leads to corruption is always the less challenging one - you don't have to sneak, don't have to worry about preventing allied losses, don't have to put up with most time limits, don't have to refrain from using certain abilities, don't let the game dictate which squads to take on missions, and so on.
• Evil Is Hammy: And goddamned HOW! Chaos is by far the hammiest faction in the game, far outhamming even the Space Marines who tend to shout bombastic righteous speech every other time they speak. The Orks are also very hammy. GLORIOUS exemple right here.
  • Averted by the Necrons; in fact, you could say they're... dead quiet! *cue Collective Groan*
• Evil Plan:
  • The campaign of Chaos Rising. Eliphas turns out to have orchestrated the events of the entire campaign to start a Blood Ravens civil war — which would have failed if a daemon destroyed the chapter's recruiting worlds.
  • Same thing for Retribution. Kyras manipulates the various factions so that their fighting will force the Inquisition to order an Exterminatus on the entire sector. Kyras would then offer the billions of resulting deaths as a sacrifice to Khorne and ascend to Daemonhood.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Almost a rule of thumb for Chaos units, particularly Daemons. The higher an Ork unit is on the tech tree, the deeper and gruffer his voice gets. What little the Necrons say is spoken in an impossibly deep Machine Monotone.
• Evil Smells Bad: Chaos Space Marines in general. Ironically, this is complained about most often in-universe by the Orks, of all people. First, in the original campaign Warboss Orkamungus refers to the Chaos Marines as "smelly"; then in Skirmish or Multiplayer mode, Orks making first contact with Chaos may lampshade this. ("Stinkin' Chaos boyz!") Then in Chaos Rising, the introduction of the Plague Champion is prime time for another moment of this during the campaign, where one member of a mob of Orks attacking him complains he "smells ripe" and makes a disgusted noise. Even the Loyalist Space Marines get in on this, with Avitus complaining that not even the Tyranids were so unpleasant to fight, which Martellus agrees with.
• Evil Tastes Good: Ulkair joyfully talks of the tastiness of souls and consuming entire sectors.
• Expansion Pack:
  • Three of them for the original: Winter Assault, Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, as much as some would like to forget that last one.
  • The sequel has Chaos Rising, which, as if the name didn't give it away, adds Chaos to the list of playable races, and Retribution, which includes playable Imperial Guard and one campaign, playable as any of the 6 races with different dialog and altered mission details.
• Expy: The Space Marine who is shown on the box art of Dawn of War I but never appears in the game looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• Eye-Obscuring Hat: The Commissar is shown like this; all you see of his face is his nose, grim-set mouth, and massive chin.
• Face–Heel Turn: In Chaos Rising, the most corrupted member of your team will do this. If none of them are corrupted, Martellus does instead.
  • Retribution confirms Avitus was the traitor.
• Faceless Mooks: Pretty much every faction has them, most notably the Eldar, whose only unhelmeted unit before Dawn of War II is the Harlequin, and the Tau, whose only non-Kroot bareheaded unit is the Ethereal.
• Faction Calculus: In the first Dawn of War it was Space Marines (Balanced), Eldar (Subversive), Orks (Horde) and Chaos (Powerhouse). Winter Assault added the Imperial Guard (Cannons). With Dark Crusade came the Tau Empire (Cannons) and the Necrons (super-Powerhouse) and from Soulstorm came the Sisters of Battle (Cannons) and the Dark Eldar (super-Subversive).
• Faction-Specific Endings: The expansions have this in various combinations:
  • In Winter Assault both the Order (Imperial Guard and Eldar) and Disorder (Orks and Chaos) campaigns have a Last-Second Ending Choice at the end of the fourth mission: whichever of your two factions first enters the shield around the war machine MacGuffin gets a final mission and ending. Dark Crusade implies that the Eldar ending is canon, albeit with several elements from the Ork ending.
  • Dark Crusade and Soulstorm have seven and nine different campaigns, respectively: one for each faction. Defeating a faction gets you an After-Action Report and a cinematic once every faction is beaten. It may be possible for a faction to be defeated by another computer-controlled faction, but the end cinematic still assumes you were the one to defeat the six/eight others.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: Eliphas sends a telepathic Breaking Speech to the invading enemy commander. The only one it really works on is General Alexander, as Taldeer and Thule insult him right back, Gorgutz tells him to get out of his head, O'Kais can't even hear him, and the Necron Lord terrifies Eliphas just by talking back.
• False Reassurance: In Dark Crusade's Chaos stronghold ending.
  Eliphas: No! I will not go to the Basilica of Torments again!
  Daemon Prince: Fear not, Apostle. The Basilica is reserved for those who may redeem themselves.
  Eliphas: No... no!
  Daemon Prince: You will have no such chance.
• Fantastic Underclass: Tau society supposedly treats its human citizens (AKA Gue'vesa) quite well, sometimes to the point of Better Living Through Evil. However, the Tau ending of Dark Crusade indicates that human populations that don't surrender of their own accord are given a much frostier reception, being subjected to extensive re-education or even forced to migrate in order to make way for Tau and Kroot colonists. Ten years after the Dark Crusade, humans make up less than 5% of the population on Kronus, a possible sterilization program has caused their birth rate to plummet, and the few we see have been reduced to living in ruined slums.
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: Like in the source material, units have a morale meter. When depleted, the unit will break and retreat to the nearest rally point or defensible position in an attempt to reform their lines. If they happen to already be in cover, they'll abandon said cover and retreat to the nearest point where they aren't at risk of enemy attack, meaning they might be under enemy fire all the way to their rally point. Luckily, broken units gain a bonus to evasion and defense, ensuring that generally some of the unit members will reach a rally point and rally, allowing the player to replenish their ranks and bring it back up to full strength.
• Field Promotion: In Dawn of War II, the Blood Ravens' manpower is greatly depleted, so the protagonist has been promoted to the rank of Force Commander by the Chapter Master after an impressive victory under his leadership and expected to save the recruiting worlds of the Blood Ravens in sub-sector Aurelia — despite being on the young side for a Space Marine and never having actually met the Chapter Master in person.
  • As an in-game loading screen fluff bit elaborates, the promotion actually happened during another campaign, but it didn't go into effect until the events of the game.
  • In the novelization for Dawn of War II, Sergeant Aramus (the nameless playable Force Commander) is made into the Force Commander for the company, replacing Thule.
• Fluffy the Terrible:
  • The Ork campaign of Retribution has a playable Kommando Nob named "Spookums." With the right equipment and abilities, he is terrifying in combat.
  • The super-heavy Ork Battlewagon you fight (and capture, in the Ork campaign) was given the ridiculously cute and surprisingly feminine name of "Daisy".
• Final Boss:
  • Dawn of War:
    • In the original campaign, main objective of the final level is to defeat Sindri, who ascended as a Daemon Prince.
    • Regardless of whom you're playing as, you would need to defeat several Necron Monoliths going for your base in the final mission in Winter Assault.
  • Dawn of War II:
    • The final level of original campaign ends with you fighting the Hive Tyrant Alpha.
    • The final level of Chaos Rising campaign ends you with fighting the Grean Unclean One named Ulkair.
    • Regardless of whom you're playing as, at the end of Retribution campaign, you would fight a massive Daemon Prince (Azariah Kyras and the Maledictum daemon).
• Finishing Move: Tons of them, in the form of "sync kills". Some units will even have personalized finishing moves against certain victims. Go ahead, check them out.
  • Big (size-wise, not number-wise) units are especially prone to doing this. The best ones, however, are the ones big units perform on other big units, for example, a Dreadnought grabbing a Wraithlord's weapon, forcing it away, grabbing it by its neck and crushing it in its power claw - in other words, a Walking Tank strangling a Humongous Mecha.
  • Or when above Humongous Mecha gets its sword stuck in said Walking Tank when it kills the pilot inside for good, forcibly removes his sword, sees that the Walking Tank is still standing, then gently tips it over.
  • The Force Commander's sync kill against the Bloodthirster in Dawn of War and its expansions deserves special mention. He performs a Colossus Climb on the thirty-foot daemon by grabbing it by the horns and swinging up, stands on its shoulders, pounds it into the ground with repeated whacks from his hammer, then vaults over its disintegrating corpse (which is on fire).
  • Perhaps one of the most epic sync kills from Chaos Rising onwards is the Avatar of Khaine vs the Great Unclean One. If the Avatar is sync killing the GUO, it will stab it in the chest; causing it to laugh and use its puke of doom on the Avatar, which responds by shoving its gigantic sword into the Great Unclean One's mouth and out the back of its head. If the GUO is sync killing the Avatar it will jab its meat cleaver sword into the Avatar's back, turn its sword upright and lift it into the air and use gravity to impale the Avatar all the way through the sword
    • In Dawn of War and its expansions, the humanoid Relic Units also had their fair share of epic sync kills. If a Bloodthirster sync kills an Avatar, the Bloodthirster gets smacked around by the Avatar, but bats the Avatar's head off with its axe in the end. If the Avatar is the sync killer, it gets knocked down, but before the Bloodthirster can capitalize on this, the Avatar impales it with his giant sword. If the Nightbringer sync kills the Avatar (never the other way around due to the Nightbringer's invulnerability) after a brief fight the Nightbringer scythes the Avatar's head off. While technically not a Relic Unit, if the Daemon Prince defeats the Greater Knarloc (pretty hard to do considering the differences in DPS and HP) it will leap up into the air with its sword pointed downward and impale the Knarloc's head and pin it to the ground before pulling its sword out and walking away.
  • In Dawn of War II, if a Chaos Aspiring Champion of Khorne or the Spare Marine Force Commander sync kills a Carnifex (really hard to do) he will perform a Colossus Climb and stand on the Carnifex's tusks, holding on to his melee weapon impaled in the side of the Carnifex's head, and blast it repeatedly in the face with his pistol before finishing it off with a blast to the mouth. This sync kill is featured in Retribution in the mission where you have to escape Typhon as Exterminatus is being performed on it. When you get to a certain point the Deranged Chaos Champion, will start roaring to the sky, enraged by the fact that people would be trying to escape from Kyras's gift of death before doing this in the Typhon Arena.
  • While not a sync kill, this is undoubtably epic. In the last mission of Retribution; after you have hammered at Daemon Prince Kyras for quite a while and brought him down to one last sliver of health, your commander (Bluddflagg for the Orks for example) will note that he's weakened and tell you to finish him off with your big damaging global power (Rok bombardment, which drops a bunch of Asteroids, for the Orks to continue this example.) Bluddflagg will say "Look, 'es reelin boys. Now it's time ta zap 'im wiff da biggest rok we 'ave." and you'll get one free usage of Rok bombardment. Once you target Kyras with this, you'll get a cutscene where Roks will start raining on Kyras, causing him to shudder until an absolutely massive rok falls on top of his head and completely destroys it. Once the dust clears you'll see the bloody stump where his head used to be and watch his corpse slump back into the lava pit. A similar thing happens with the other factions (with the Space Marines using orbital bombardment instead, for example.) But man is it satisfying to watch Kyras's head explode.
• Flamethrower Backfire: Done in the intro of Dawn of War, when the flamethrowers exploded when hit by an axe.
• Fog of War: The map is initially black and explored areas not within a unit or building's line of sight are covered in grey fog.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Dark Crusade, some plot elements are hinted at by the flavor text for the territories, like the identity of the Necron's Mouth of Sauron or the fact that there's a Nurglite daemon bound to the Hellstorm cannon (though this is only revealed in the Chaos campaign).
  • Dark Crusade gets another one that acts as a Sequel Hook. After the credits have rolled, the camera zooms out from Kronus until it captures the whole star system, showing huge explosions going off on multiple planets along the way. Then Soulstorm rolled around which... lets you blow up shit across multiple planets that're even arranged roughly similarly to the ones from DC's extro.
  • Early in II, the Marines realize that the Orks are actually using strategy, which given these are Orks, tip them off to something manipulating them. Later, Cyrus has an Oh, Crap! moment when he hears that an Astropath has been complaining about a "Shadow in The Warp" (he's the only one that knows about Tyranids).
  • A good case in Chaos Rising. In the opening trailer, the Big Bad shows its horrifying laughing face around the 'depositing untold horrors of the Warp' part, way before you find out anything about it.
  • The first expedition into the Judgement of Carrion sees gradual warp exposure steadily wear on your squad's sergeants (and they steadily gain Corruption points if you allow a timer to keep ticking down). Pay close attention to what they say, however, and you'll realise that they're outlining their reason for being the traitor.
    • Thaddeus cries out that "I have done what you asked! No more!" His treachery comes from a Deal with the Devil with Ulkair to allow the Third Company to come to the strike team's aid at the end of II.
    • Cyrus complains "He leads us in circles! Why does he command!?" His treachery is born from an inability to tolerate the incompetence within the Blood Ravens' leadership any longer, having started with Boreale's disastrous mishandling of the Karauva Campaign in Soulstorm.
    • Avitus yells "KILL THEM ALL! Let there be BLOOD!" in a frenzy. His treachery stems from his despair at his Chapter Master's own Chaos allegiance, feeling that nothing he did mattered and seeing the galaxy for the Forever War filled Crapsack World that it is, with the only thing he has left being killing.
    • Tarkus rants about how "It must be mine! Then we can make it right." His treachery stems from his morals being twisted under the influence of The Blighted Bolter, which promised him the power the save the Chapter from its dire straits.
    • Jonah screams "Get out! GET OUT GET OUT!!" in a seeming panic. His treachery stems from Demonic Possession, with the daemon taking advantage of his wounds from battling the Tyranid Hive Mind in II, plus Kyras selling off the access rites to his Psychic Hood, to steadily take control of Jonah.
• Freudian Excuse: Part of Avitus' hatred towards Imperial Guardsmen is due to how he grew up with his settlement being oppressed by a corrupt Imperial Guard regiment. The other half is having his two best friends killed by Guardsmen during the assault on Victory Bay.
• Friendly Enemy: If Tarkus is the traitor, he constantly refers to your strike force as "brothers" and offers tactical advice while you're making your way to him, and quotes from the Codex Astartes during the actual boss fight. He's basically acting completely normally, which utterly infuriates your sergeants.
• Friendly Fireproof: Averted and inverted—not only can your artillery and/or other explosive weapons (grenade launchers generally) harm your own troops, but if you, as the Imperial Guard, attach a Commissar to an infantry squad, you can actually have him execute one of your troopers to raise the morale and accuracy of all nearby soldiers. You can still pour small arms into a chaotic melee without any harmful consequences to your troops, on the other hand (though all units engaged in melee combat take 50% less ranged damage). This is one of the most obvious breaks from the tabletop game, where this is disallowed for the most part.
  • The Ork's Burna Bomb unleashes a massive explosion that turns nearly everything around it into a flying corpse. However, the Mad Dok who plants it also has an ability that makes a friendly unit invulnerable, so in the right conditions the bomb can be Friendly Fireproof.
  • Horribly averted if you don't back Cyrus far away enough from his Remote Detonator, which can kill him and his squad in one hit, even at full health, if the blast so much as wings him! It can also do the same to your other squads.
• Frontline General: Taken even further than the base game: the Imperial Guard's general is literally their only melee unit until the later tech tiers.
• Game Mod:
  • Lots, with some truly ambitious ones like Dawn of Warhammer 40k: Firestorm.
  • Lately the most popular mod is Ultimate Apocalypse The Hunt Begins which not only brings many improvements from other mods such as Firestorm but also adds many of it's own features such as massive army sizes, maps, and even gigantic units such as Titans and greater Daemons. It also tries to balance the game so that pretty much all factions have a viable chance of winning.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: A minor example. The Ancient from Retribution's Space Marine campaign has taken a vow of silence. He never speaks, not even to confirm the player's orders until The Reveal of his identity on the Judgement of Carrion. Tarkus talks differently from his Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising self, but that is to be expected since he hasn't used his voice in a decade.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Initially played straight with the Nightbringer, the god of Death, worshipped by a race that specializes in killing everything. The Necron Lord can let the Nightbringer possess him for a short period of time, during which, he is invincible and floats around chopping up enemies good. It seems a shame that he's not actually all that good at killing things - he doesn't have the raw killing power that some other units have. However, upon inspection of his in-game stats, he does vastly more damage to heavily armored vehicles and monsters... which includes every top tier unique unit in the game. While he won't be laying waste to entire armies, his damage output is such that during his brief stint on the battlefield he is capable of killing any single unit in the game that doesn't run away from him.
  • In fluff, Necron Gauss Weapons (which are not Gauss weapons at all) are capable of eating through any kind of armor, and can inflict damaging blows on even the sturdiest target. In the game, they're about as effective as regular guns against armor.
  • The Eldar Avatar of Khaine requires a sacrifice to be summoned in the form of an Exarch being chosen to host him. In-game, he's built at the portal like any other unit (although this sacrifice is depicted in Dark Crusade's stronghold and Retribution's Eldar campaign).
  • A zigzagging example: in fluff, teleport homers and drop pod beacons are very necessary to avoid Tele Fragging. In the game, all you need is another unit around to remove the Fog of War.
  • Space Marine players will most likely go through a far larger number of Astartes in a single battle than will have been brought to the battlefield. By the end of a campaign, you may have gone through several Chapters worth of them.
  • Angelos gets trapped in the Warp towards the end of DOW II, including being unable to communicate. However, he still gives briefings for side missions like killing large Tyranids.
  • The Tau's primary commander unit is an XV22 Battlesuit, intended to make them distinct from their more rank-and-file XV8 Battlesuits. However, in the fluff, the XV22 is a one of a kind Super Prototype utilized only by the legendary Commander Shadowsun.
  • Tau railguns are supposedly one-hit-kill weapons against vehicles- the fluff bit describes how the tank had only two little holes in it... and a spray of gore sixty feet long from the crew's liquefied remains when the projectile passed through the tank so fast it sucked out everything not nailed down. In game, they do lots of damage to vehicles and that's it.
  • The Thur'abis Catacombs are, well, underground. Doesn't stop things like orbital bombardments or airlifted buildings from dropping in.
  • In Soulstorm, the Dark Eldar's special ability is that they can move through any ancient gate, giving them the ability to strike at any planet they want (and the archive for their stronghold is written by an abducted Fire Warrior). When facing them, it's extremely likely they'll move like the other armies, sticking around Kaurava IV and fighting only the Chaos forces there.
  • During Retribution's campaign, your heroes are trapped on a Space Hulk and need to fight through hordes of Tyranids and orks to escape. Not only are you expected to use teleporters strewn around the map to bring troops in, General Castor can still call in his Leman Russ reinforcements via Valkyrie.
• Gas Mask Mooks:
  • Imperial Guard Kasrkin and Stormtroopers wear gas masks - Kasrkin have a small gasmask built into their helmet, while Stormtroopers have full face-covering masks. Some regular Guardsmen in the first game may also have a mask instead of just a helmet.
  • All of the Space Marines' heavy infantry wear standard Astartes helmets - except for their heroes, naturally.
• Garrisonable Structures: Originally used for transportation in Dawn of War; an Imperial Guard specialty from Winter Assault onwards. Useful in Dawn of War II and its expansions, but beware of units bearing flamers, demolition charges or frag grenades.
  • The Imperial Guard have an ability that air-lifts in a bunker in Retribution.
• Gathering Steam: In the first game, there are several upgrades that exist solely to slow the player down, meant to represent Non-Entity General slowly escalating their engagement in response to other Non Entity Generals doing the same.
  • Orks use a unique third resource that counts how many orks are present and requires a certain amount of orks present to build the more powerful units. This is meant to reflect the In-Universe growth of the Ork Ecosystem to the point it can support the more powerful Ork units - though Gork and Mork knows why it is needed for looted tanks.
  • The Necrons' Greater Summoning Core is a building that produces and researches nothing, but is needed to get their final units.
  • The Eldar, likewise, need to research upgrades which do absolutely nothing before they are able to field their more powerful units. Aptly named 'Mobilization For War' and 'Annihilate the Enemy'.
  • Kroot squads have an ability that lets them eat corpses (allied and enemy) to increase their maximum health (by up to 300 per Kroot).
• Geo Effects: The cover system. Units in cover move slower but take less ranged damage.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Necrons will come off as this in the Winter Assault Disorder campaign. While they're mentioned earlier in the Order campaign, in Disorder they essentially show up out of nowhere.
• Glass Cannon:
  • The Dark Eldar's Dais of Destruction in Soulstorm. Extremely high firepower plus a beam capable of literally wiping out an entire army in one shot. Not exactly "glass", but still by far the most fragile of the Relic Units.
  • On a smaller scale, Necron Immortals, with very long range and devastating anti-vehicle/structure firepower, but low HP and a small squad size that can see them wiped out in seconds.
  • All set-up weapons in the sequel are powerful anti-infantry and/or anti-vehicle counters at range. At melee range, you'd have better had them start retreating before the first hit gets in.
  • Eldar of Dawn of War II are, comparatively, the Glass Cannon faction (they even have near-literal glass cannons).
  • In the Chaos Rising expansion this role is easily fulfilled by the traitor House Vandis militia (using Imperial Guard equipment) you encounter in the beginning and the droves of Chaos cultists. Both of them can bear weapons with high damage output, but tend to die from a poke. They try to compensate by walking around in big numbers, but it doesn't help them much, it simply gets them cut down by the dozen.
  • The Tau faction (not including their Kroot auxiliaries) have high speed, high damage output and very poor resilience, which means that knowing how to micromanage them is essential to win.
• Godzilla Threshold: Sub-Sector Aurelia is on the verge of being invaded by an Exterminatus fleet in the campaign mode of Retribution. Having seen the true extent of the threat posed by the Exterminatus and Kyras himself, the Tyranid Hive Mind resorts to summoning the Swarmlord, who's basically the grandaddy of all Hive Tyrants, because the stakes really are that high.
• Go-Go Enslavement: The Dark Eldar Dais of Destruction has two half-naked Sisters of Battle chained to it.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: In Chaos Rising, you can find a recording of Kyras confirming that he betrayed everything he stood for. Listening to it gives the entire team 5 corruption points.
• A Good Way to Die: The Imperial Priest that can be attached to Imperial Guard squads in the expansions for the original holds to this trope, if his battlefield lines are anything to go by:
  Imperial Priest: Our deaths shall be MAGNIFICENT!
• Goomba Stomp: Most melee units that are capable of flying or leaping. The Assault Marines in the Dawn of War II intro do it with such force that they shake the camera.
  • The Assault Jump in Dawn of War II actually causes damage and also breaks various things usable as cover, making it much more effective.
  • Skykilla, one of the first bosses in Dawn of War II does this, but his version stuns him momentarily. It also has a massive tell in the form of a glowing rune on the ground before he takes off, giving you time to re-position.
• Gorn: Dawn of War II's 'sync-kills'.
  • Summoning a Bloodthirster, an animation reused to represent a Daemon Prince killing Eliphas in Dark Crusade.
  • Units in Dawn of War II can be blown apart into their component parts. There is no greater joy than seeing the Dreadnought's Assault Cannon Barrage ability mince entire squads of infantry.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • The last image a non-Eldar player sees of Farseer Taldeer is her charging down a slope, surrounded by enemies. Then the camera tilts up into the sky...
  • Subverted by the first few seconds of the intro movie for Dawn of War II. And throughout the intro movie, for that matter, with one of the tamest deaths being a Warp Spider taking a Bolt Pistol round to the face.
• The Great Exterminator: Inquisitor Adrastia gave the "Exterminatus" order on the planet Typhon Primaris, where plants and animals had become mutated by Tyranid organism infection, killing the human settlers' livestock. This act of last resort to prevent spread rendered it a "Dead World", no longer able to support life. The notorious order draws the ire of a Chaos Champion who must then be defeated.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Aside from the Chaos Gods, the Nightbringer is mentioned fairly heavily with the narrations with the Necrons in Dark Crusade. Kyras could be considered this during Chaos Rising, we hear about him, but dealing with him is left as a Sequel Hook. Abaddon could also be considered this, being Eliphas' Bad Boss that stays in the background.
• Grim Reaper: The Essence of the Nightbringer, which is a 40 foot tall metal reaper that shoots green lightning.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: Quit, and the "are you sure?" dialog box is headlined COWARDS DIE IN SHAME. About as subtle as you might expect, given the source material; sadly, it was not kept for the sequel.

H - L

• Ham-to-Ham Combat:
  • Gorgutz vs. Crull in Winter Assault. Pretty much every scene the two appear in turns into a scenery-chewing contest.
  • Units in Dawn of War II can occasionally throw lines related to whatever they're doing. If in battle, this has the potential to turn into a literal example of ham-to-ham combat.
  • As they do in the first. Watching Khornate Berserkers screaming "BREAK THEM IN HALF!!!" answered by Grey Knights proclaiming "THIS IS THE JUDGEMENT OF THE RIGHTEOUS, SCUM!!!" is a thing of deafening beauty.
• Harmful Healing: The description for the Imperial Guard General's healing ability in Dawn of War II: Retribution states that it doesn't so much heal the recipient as fill him with a sense of well-being. It is also explicitly stated to have long-term side effects, but very few guardsmen live long enough to experience them.
• Have You Seen My God?: The Ascendant Daemon-Prince Azariah Kyras claims that the Emperor's "soul was picked clean centuries ago." Captain Angelos states that daemons are liars, and that slaying them is the only way to avoid their influences. The Dark Imperium storyline proves Angelos correct, since the Emperor is still cogent enough to speak with Guilliman.
• Healing Boss: During Araghast the Pillager's bossfight in Chaos Rising, he summons squads of cultists which he attacks to regain health and pulls back through a portal when he runs low on health and cultists. The fight ends when Eliphas (who's opening the portals) betrays him and leaves him to die.
• Hearing Voices: Chaos, naturally. Chaos Space Marines in Dawn of War and its expansions will occasionally ask you when you select them:
  Chaos Space Marines: DO YOU HEAR THE VOICES TOO!?
  • Dark Crusade features Eliphas doing this to the player's commander during the Chaos stronghold. Gorgutz and General Alexander are freaked out by it, but Shas'o Kais only hears it as "a buzzing in my comms".^note The Tau have next to no presence in the Warp, meaning more passive abilities like telepathic communication have little effect on them.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Most Imperial squad leaders and commanders fight bare-headed, just like in the source material. Ogryn Bone'eads, Tau Shas'ui/Shas'vre and Sororitas Sisters Superiors are the only exceptions. The other factions have a mix of bare-headed and helmeted leaders.
  • Averted by the Eldar, as every one of their units wears a helmet
• Heroic BSoD: In such a Crapsack World, this is only to be expected.
  • Angelos has one when Isador falls to Chaos, Taldeer has another when the (much larger) Necron second wave appears in Winter Assault, and most of the commanders in Dark Crusade or Soulstorm have one as you batter inexorably through their stronghold.
  • At the end of Dawn of War II, your Space Marines seem a little affected by the Armageddon being critically damaged and sacrificing itself, leaving them on the ground in the middle of an endless Tyranid swarm. That is, until the chapter fleet comes out of the Warp just in time to save the day.
  • Diomedes has a major one in Retribution's Space Marine campaign. After finally realizing Kyras was a villain the whole time AND barely surviving the start of the Inquisition's Exterminatus campaign, he's ready to just sit down and die, figuring the Blood Ravens are officially doomed anyway. It takes the Ancient (actually Tarkus) threatening to kill him and providing a Rousing Speech for him to return to his senses and start bringing down Kyras.
• Heroic Mime:
  • The Force Commander in Dawn of War II's campaign, though he does gets a few small bits of dialogue during the mission briefings in Chaos Rising. All text, of course. Lampshaded in the loading screen text for the first mission which describes him as a man of few words.
  • The Ancient in Retribution, though justified in that he took a vow of silence in penance for unspecified past failings.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • The guy who plants the flag in the opening cutscene of Dawn of War.
  • Averted in Dark Crusade, where you plant a bomb in the Necron base... then run like hell. The soldiers who get the honor of covering your escape however...
  • Averted in a different way by how the mini-epilogue plays out if you won the battle as the Orks. A lot of Ork boyz did get left behind because they were slow or stupid or unlucky, and the survivors think that's pretty funny.
• Hero Must Survive: Subverted for the most part, getting a hero killed only means you have to re-train them (and most Necron Lord strategies involve him reviving in the middle of the enemy base). The only exception is the Necron stronghold in Dark Crusade, where your hero personally plants a bomb in their catacombs and needs to escape alive to win.
• Hero Unit: Called Commanders, they generally have special abilities and superior damage reduction against all types of attack.
  • In Dawn of War and its expansions, you can train one Commander of each type and several of each Semi-Commander. They are as follows:
    • Space Marines: Force Commander, Librarian and Chaplain. Apothecaries function as Semi-Commanders.
    • Eldar: Farseer and Seer Council. Harlequins function as Semi-Commanders.
    • Orks: Warboss and Big Mek. Mad Doks function as Semi-Commanders.
    • Chaos: Chaos Lord and Sorcerer.
    • Imperial Guard: The Command Squad, led by the Imperial General, and the Vindicare Assassin. The Command Squad can be reinforced with any combination of the three Semi-Commanders: Commissars, Psykers and Priests.
    • Tau Empire: Tau Commander and Ethereal. Kroot Shapers function as Semi-Commanders and can only join Kroot units.
    • Necrons: The Necron Lord is the only true Commander. Lord Destroyers are technically Commanders as well, but are counted as vehicles.
    • Sisters of Battle: Canoness and Confessor.
    • Dark Eldar: Archon and Haemonculus.
  • In Dawn of War II, you get to pick a single commander unit, one of three per race; which one you pick determines what global abilities you get to use in a multiplayer game. As follows:
    • Space Marines: Force Commander, Apothecary and Techmarine.
    • Eldar: Warlock, Warp Spider Exarch and Farseer.
    • Orks: Warboss, Kommando Nob and Mekboy.
    • Tyranids: Hive Tyrant, Ravener Alpha and Lictor Alpha.
    • Chaos Space Marines: Chaos Lord, Plague Champion and Sorcerer.
    • Imperial Guard: Inquisitor, Commissar Lord and Lord General.
  • In Retribution's Tyranid campaign, the Hive Tyrant is the only hero, with the other slots occupied by standard unit squads.
  • In The Last Stand, each race is represented by a single one of the hero units listed above; not always the one you'd expect either. They are Force Commander (Space Marines), Big Mek (Orks), Farseer (Eldar), Hive Tyrant (Tyranids), Sorcerer (Chaos Space Marines) and Lord General (Imperial Guard). Additionally, the Tau and Necrons make their only DoW II appearances in this mode as DLC characters, represented by the Shas'O Commander and the Overlord respectively.
• Hired by the Oppressor: Winter Assault: Lord Crull hates needing to use stealth units like cultists (as a follower of the Blood God Khorne, anything more subtle than Attack! Attack! Attack! gets his disapproval) but even he recognizes the need for battlefield intelligence and scouts.
• Hold the Line:
  • The Imperial Guard are very good at this thanks to their powerful turrets and universal Garrisonable Structures.
  • The final mission of Dawn of War II has your small platoon of Space Marines and Imperial Guardsmen holding off thousands of Tyranids while poisoning the Hive Mind until Gabriel Angelos and the chapter fleet arrive.
• Hollywood Tactics:
  • The Dawn of War intro, in which a squad of Space Marines with Heavy Bolters charges into melee with Orks.
  • Commander Boreale's much-parodied stronghold speech lays out his plan, holding his units in reserve to allow for quick insertions from orbit onto the enemy advance, a tactic the Codex Astartes calls "Steel Rain". The idea of exposing a small portion of one's force at a time against the entire enemy force already has a name, though: Defeat in detail.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: Certain Chaos units seem to believe the player is one of their dark gods.
• Humongous-Headed Hammer: Dawn of War was the first work in 40k to depict Space Marines wielding thunder hammers outside of Terminator armor (or the Salamanders chapter^note Salamanders use lots of forging iconography, including lots of hammers), let alone two-handed ones. This inspired Games Workshop to create a line of tabletop models with that kind of equipment in subsequent editions.
  • In gameplay, Space Marine Force Commanders along with Assault Terminator Squads can get access to thunder hammers that can stun victims.
  • In the campaign, Inquisitor Mordecai Toth gives Brother-Captain Gabriel Angelos a Daemonhammer called God-Splitter, whose head is almost as big across as Gabriel's shoulders in his Powered Armor. It becomes his signature weapon throughout the rest of the series.
• Hunter of Monsters: Used in gameplay via Weapon of X-Slaying and thematically used by the Tau.
  • Anti-Air: Averted in most cases; apart from the fact that aircraft only appear from Soulstorm onwards, any ranged unit can hit a flyer, so there's no need for a dedicated anti-air unit. Necron Attack Scarabs are the exception, as they can only hit air units from Soulstorm onwards, and certain listening posts come with optional upgrades designed to hit enemy aircraft where it hurts.
  • Anti-Armor: Anything effective against Heavy Infantry. This is an important distinction from...
  • Anti-Infantry: Most early-game units are this, particularly starting infantry, which necessitates waiting to attack enemy structures with any armour value other than low until you get...
  • Anti-Vehicle: Most anti-vehicle infantry only pops up in Tier 2, which is usually no problem because on the whole, vehicles only appear in Tier 2 anyway, Dark Eldar being the only exception. Doubles as Siege Engines, doing decent damage to buildings compared to anti-infantry units.
  • As for the Tau, they often mention hunting phrases and motifs, as well as using the hunter-type playstyle of putting emphasis on ranged combat and working as a team to defeat their enemies. Justified because the fluff of 40k states that the Fire Caste bases its combat doctrines on ancestral Tau hunting rites.
• Idiot Ball: The Eldar get two of these in Retribution's campaign when they fight... the Eldar. Kayleth goes to greet the Biel-Tan Eldar, they try to kill her, vaguely saying something about her being prophesied to kill them. Kayleth decides they're working for Kyras. At the end of the level, you've destroyed their Seer council, which was conducting some kind of ritual, which Kyras gleefully informs you was slowing the Exterminatus fleet. Kayleth having successfully ensured the annihilation of both Typhon and the buried Craftworld's Infinity Circuit, she investigates the site again when the rest of Biel-Tan announces they're going to retreat and blow up the access tunnel. Instead of, y'know, calling them to ask that they wait, Kayleth once again slaughters her way through the Eldar, the mission ending when the fatally wounded Biel-Tan exarch turns into the Avatar of Khaine.
  • It's one for the Biel-Tan Warp Spider Exarch even moreso. At least Kayleth tries to reason with him. Rather than try to explain himself properly — even the Tyranids would have the wherewithal to recognise the danger Exterminatus poses — he just turns his warhost against you and orders your forces killed.
• I Let You Win: The entire campaign of Dawn of War was orchestrated by the Maledictum daemon, causing as much bloodshed as posible to power itself up.
• Implacable Man:
  • Eldar Fire Dragons in Dark Crusade and beyond. Mass of Baneblade + Fleet Of Foot + Decent health = Imba base wreckers that can't be disrupted.
  • One of Eliphas' pieces of wargear in the Dark Crusade Chaos campaign is a pair of boots that make him immune to knockdown, letting him charge through absolutely anything without slowing down.
  • The Librarian in Dawn of War and the Apothecary in Dawn of War II both have a power that can temporarily render their troops invulnerable, as do Ork Mad Doks. (I'LL BRING DA FIGHTIN' JUICE!) and the Priests of the Imperial Guard (Rise up and strike them down!). Necrons of course go without saying.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Units firing while moving can only shoot roughly in front of them and to their left while hitting less than half the time. Seraphim squads retain full accuracy when shooting on the move, while Dual Wielding, suspended from jetpacks, and can shoot behind them as they move.
• Inappropriate Pride:
  • Khornate Berserkers leaving a transport vehicle will sometimes happily claim they murdered the pilot.
    We need a new driver, this one is dead!
  • Gorgutz' henchman grins happily because Gorgutz named a plan after him. Said plan consists of calling Crull a grot, and was named Plan: Stupid by Gorgutz (and led to the fan belief that the henchman actually is named Stupid).
• Inevitable Mutual Betrayal: Winter Assault has this in both campaigns. The Imperials are violent xenophobes, while the Eldar are known to happily allow billions of humans to die if it can save a handful of their own. The forces of Chaos and the Orks, on the other hand, end all their conversations cheerfully reminding the other that they will kill them as soon as they're no longer needed.
• Informed Equipment:
  • Averted. One of the highlights of the series' engine is watching units change their equipment in response to how they are upgraded.
  • Double extra averted in Dawn of War II onwards. You get equippable wargear in the campaign mode that dramatically changes the look and function of your squads, and as you advance in multiplayer rank, your units get more and more bling. And yet, played straight in multiplayer, as the better looking rank unlock armor is purely decorative.
• Injured Vulnerability:
  • In Soulstorm Farseer Caerys can get a pistol that may automatically kill units whose health is below a certain percentage.
  • The text for the Mad Dok's fighting juice ability implies this was the case in earlier versions, reading that using it on a friendly squad makes it invulnerable to death (they still take damage but don't die), but once it ends orks whose health is too low die.
  • Dawn of War II has several traits and weapons that instantly kill an enemy with less than 20% of their health.
• Insane Troll Logic Insane Ork Lojik:
  • The Nob piloting "Daisy", exclamation point. When told that the needle is in the red, he shakes it off by saying that "Red goez fasta!" and when told that Daisy hit something it wasn't supposed to hit, he says there's nothing Daisy isn't supposed to hit.
  • Kaptin Bluddflagg also pulls one in the beginning of the first mission in the Ork campaign in Retribution.
    Kaptin Bluddflagg: YAHAHAHA! Dese gits just made da classic blunder: Attackin' an Ork who 'adn't found 'im already! Now we'z can stomp dem fasta!
• Instant-Win Condition:
  • "Control Area" and "Take and Hold" victory conditions. The default mode of play for multiplayer in Dawn of War II is "Victory Point Control". Players can attempt to destroy the enemy's HQ(s) instead, but that is very unlikely if they aren't winning already as said HQs are very durable.
  • "Destroy HQ" can count, especially in campaign missions; if you can send a small force of jetpacking Lightning Bruisers into the (handily marked) centre of the enemy's massive base to destroy their HQ, you're done. No matter if it was a Suicide Mission, the remainder of your forces are outnumbered ten-to-one, and the enemy have enough resources to build 50 more HQs.
  • "Assassination", especially against the computer. When the victory condition is killing hero units and keeping yours alive, maybe he shouldn't lead the charge against an enemy base.
• Interface Spoiler: Played with in the base campaign for Dawn of War II. You'll start being awarded equipment for a Dreadnought long before you actually unlock it. Unlike other squads, this equipment doesn't refer to its wearer by name, simply reading "Dreadnought." It isn't until the Dreadnought is unlocked that you learn it is Davian Thule, your commanding officer, and this is the "healing" the apothecaries have been struggling with.
  • In Chaos Rising, mousing over certain battle-brothers Chaos abilities gives away their reason for becoming the Traitor (Thaddeus calls in his Deal with the Devil, Avitus succumbs to his Blood Knight tendencies, Tarkus is corrupted by the Daemon Bolter, etc).
• Irony: Chaos Sorcerer Sindri Myr and Fallen Librarian Azariah Kyras ascend to Daemonhood by pledging themselves to Khorne. That shouldn't be possible — Sindri and Kyras are Psykers, and Khorne Does Not Like Magic. This lore discrepancy can be explained as part of the Acceptable Breaks from Canon mentioned above.
  • This can be Hand Waved for both of them however. Sindri is heavily implied to have been a member of Chaos Undivided and only used pledges to Khorne since the Daemon of the Maledictum is of Khorne as well, and the Daemon pretty much admits that he ate his soul. Kyras, on the other hand, is not a Sorcerer but a Librarian, an important distinction in the use of their powers (as Khorne despises the former, but would at least tolerate the latter), and even then Kyras is rarely shown using any sort of psyker-based ability and his planned sacrifice of billions of souls to Khorne in the Exterminatus apparently is enough to let it slide.
  • Chaos Lord Crull, who is in charge of a World Eaters warband on Lorn V, has a Sorcerer to serve as his advisor. No true chaos warband that is utterly devoted to Khorne would permit a Sorcerer to be in their presence with their head still on their shoulders.
  • And then there's Carron, who despite serving Khorne repeatedly acts contrary to the most elementary tenets of Khornate worship in his Stronghold battle:
    • His base is invulnerable and automatically kills enemies inside it with poison (Khorne wants blood spilled in combat, both from his servants and their enemies).
    • He put up shrines dedicated to Khorne to power the killing field (Khorne emphatically does not want anything more complicated than a pile of skulls built in worship of him, as time spent building structures is time that could be spent killing).
    • As the shrines fall, Carron starts whining, cringing, and even demanding Khorne do something about it before claiming that he and his forces will strangle the enemy (Khorne does not like the following: cowards, complainers, those who aren't willing to do the job themselves, and methods of killing that don't involve bloodshed).
• It Can Think: The Tyranids are hungry animals coerced into a horde, but you should not underestimate them, because the Hive Mind all Tyranids obey is highly intelligent and adaptable. Cyrus repeatedly reminds his fellow Marines of this during Dawn of War II. In the first mission of the Tyranid campaign in Retribution, the Imperial Guard are taught this the hard way. Sergeant Merrick claims they're harmless if you know what you're doing moments before the Hive Lord appears and chomps him. Not long afterwards, a Guardsman expresses shock and horror at the sight of Tyranids going for cover, complaining that they're supposed to be dumb beasts. General Castor himself reaches the same realisation after you beat him.
  General Castor: These creatures are not simple beasts...
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: A Dark Eldar yells "Look what crawled out of its cage. And now, it will die." during their stronghold mission. Of course, the Dark Eldar view everyone as beneath them, including other Dark Eldar.
• Jack of All Stats: Imperial Army autocannon teams in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm provide a solid middle ground between the fast-firing anti-infantry heavy bolter and the slow-firing anti-vehicle lascannon, being effective against both but not quite as much as either. Their usefulness is compounded by their enormous range that enables them to outrange absolutely anything that isn't an artillery unit, and even most of these must advance into autocannon range for indirect fire. Yes, that includes any and all of the notoriously long-ranged Tau units^note Fire Warrior Veterans are the sole exception, but these are rare and not especially dangerous, which consist almost exclusively of heavy infantry and light/medium vehicles, both of which are particularly vulnerable to autocannon shells. Generally speaking, assaulting a position defended by multiple autocannon teams will incur heavy casualties no matter how, or with what faction, you approach the battle.
• Jack of All Trades:
  • The Ancient in Retribution. He is a Tactical Marine after all and fully capable of utilizing any weapon used by Tactical, Devastator or Assault Marine squads.
  • The Eldar have Autarch Kayleth, who functions similarly, able to shoot, jump, and assault depending on how you kit her out.
  • Both are justified since Tactical Marines have to learn the tactics of all other marine types first and Autarchs have to learn the combat disciplines of sundry aspect warriors as part of their own training.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Just about everyone will go to lengths to achieve what they want, even if it means crossing the line or to lose their sense of morality.
• Jurisdiction Friction: The cause of Imperial factions being at each other's throats. Shared goals aren't enough to unite them because their broader agendas and/or reasons for getting involved are usually too divergent.
• Karma Houdini: Gorgutz, who has managed to escape in each game upon defeat rather than face death, perhaps due to Popularity Power.
• Karma Meter: A 'Morality' meter in Chaos Rising, which affects what abilities and wargear are available to your squads. The campaign also has multiple endings, based on your choices in-game.
• Kick the Dog: To be expected of a game set in the world of Warhammer 40,000. Even the Tau Empire have their moments. Of course, since the motivations of all the playable forces are so different from game to game, the frequency and depravity of these deeds varies greatly. Playing the campaigns as a Human/Imperial faction brings with it a large amount of contractual Lawful Stupidity and fighting your would-be allies due to Jurisdiction Friction, playing as the Eldar entails redundant hostility to people who may have nothing against you, playing as the Orks means attacking and killing people just because they're there, playing as Chaos means copious levels of Evil Is Petty etc.
• Kill Enemies to Open:
  • One of Dark Crusade's special campaign abilities lets you move/attack twice per turn. This ability is represented as a favor granted by a Khornate daemon that's bound to the battlefield, so naturally gaining it requires killing a specific number of enemy units before losing the same number of units to the enemy. The actual number depends on who you're fighting on the map - Zerg Rush armies like the Imperial Army or Orks require more kills than elite armies like Space Marines or Necrons.
  • When trapped on Typhon in the Deranged Chaos Champion's arena in Retribution, the barriers around the arena will only fall once you kill the Champion, and he only emerges after you kill a sufficient number of orks, chaos forces and tyranids that continuously pour into the arena.
• Kill Him Already!: Avitus gets fed up with Araghast taunting you over the comms very quickly and wants him dead, sooner rather than later. In fact, he gets corruption if you don't bring him along for the associated mission.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • A number of factions have access to flamethrowers, though it is featured more prominently with the Sisters of Battle, in much the same way that sunlight is featured more prominently on the surface of the sun.
  • The most spectacular skill of the Librarian in Chaos Rising is throwing fireballs as big as himself that incinerate and scatter infantry about as effectively as the Dreadnought's Assault Barrage.
  • Melta weapons, though not technically fire, tend to qualify as "fire" weapons in-universe, given their thermal properties allowing for the burning of witches and torching vehicles.
• Kill Sat: Tau and Space Marine bombardments are delivered by the orbiting Air Caste Fleet/Space Marine Battle Barge.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: The Blood Ravens have a habit of recovering, or otherwise "finding" relics from other chapters, among other sources.
• Large Ham: Nearly every main character (except Eliphas and Taldeer), but especially the narrator. Dawn of War II makes everyone a bit more sedate and sinister (witness the new badass-sounding Eldar), but which angle is better comes down to personal preference.
  • Chaos Rising compensated for that with the new villains (Eliphas remaining his old self) packing a ton of ham. The leader of the Chaos warband, Araghast, seems incapable of saying anything without hamming it up to ridiculous levels. The true Big Bad, in turn, takes this to unholy lengths — every line packs twice the ham compared to Araghast's.
  • Soulstorm's Sisters Of Battle are particularly bombastic, and none more so than their flame-thrower tank:
    Immolator pilot: Behold...THE IMMOLATOR!
    Immolator pilot: It all goes down in FLAAAAMES!
  • Retribution has the beefiest ham of all. Chapter Master Kyras gives a spine-chilling speech praising Khorne and urging his followers to let the galaxy burn.
  • Everything the generic Daemon Prince says. Literally.
  Daemon Prince: I have ascended - NONE may challenge ME!
  Daemon Prince: All pale before my might.
  Daemon Prince: They. Hear. Their. DOOM. Approaching!
  Daemon Prince: DO NOT TRIFLE WITH ME, WORM!
  Daemon Prince: I AM DESTRUCTION INCARNATE!!!
• Large Ham Title: Apollo Diomedes, Captain of the Honor Guard! When selected, on of his lines is "You have Captain Diomedes".
• Laser Sight: Sniper Rifles in Dawn of War II have them emitting from underneath the barrel, in addition to a scope, for no logical reason other than it looks cool.
  • Also, the sponson mounted twin-linked heavy bolters on the Baneblade.
  • Lasguns- oh wait, they're actually firing.
  • Scout sniper rifles in Dawn of War have them... so that a human player can spot them when cloaked.
  • Lootas Beamy Deffgun in Retribution.
• Laughably Evil: No matter how evil Gorgutz and Ulkair are, you can't help but laugh at them due to the good acting associated with their characters.
• Laughing Mad: Sanctioned Psykers and Chaos Marines will spontaneously burst into fits of crazed laughing when idle, for much the same reason.
• Left Hanging: Gabriel Angelos and the daemon in the Maledictum. He doesn't tell us about it when he appears in Dawn of War II, nor does anyone ask him about it. It apparently was responsible for much of the Blood Raven's problems, and is now presumably very unhappy after you blow up Chapter Master Kyras and purged the chapter of corruption in Retribution.
• Leitmotif: Especially noticable in Dawn of War II, where every faction has a few different tracks (almost all with Orchestral Bombing when the on-screen action heats up) dedicated to them, and each of those faction-particular tracks shares elements among themselves:
  • Space Marine music tends to have Ominous High Gothic Chanting.
  • Ork music tends to have Tribal Chanting and Drums.
  • Eldar music tends to alternate between a One-Woman Wail and an Ethereal Choir singing in Eldanar.
  • Tyranid music tends to have Drone of Dread and "Psycho" Strings.
  • Chaos music tends to have Ominous Pipe Organ with an occasional Dark Reprise of the loyalists marines' Ominous High Gothic Chanting.
  • The Imperial Guard music tends toward Marching Chants that range from upbeat to ominous.
  • Sisters of Battle, obviously, have Ominous Pipe Organ, Ominous High Gothic Chanting and One-Woman Wail.
• Lemony Narrator: The Narrator for Dark Crusade and Soulstorm was a bit of a Large Ham, and had INDEED an unusual way of intoning his monologue.
• Let's You and Him Fight:
  • The Blood Raven Space Marines and the Imperial Guards in Dark Crusade are allies fighting for the Imperium of Man, but due to the Mêlée à Trois nature of the campaign where all factions want each other dead to completely control Kronus, the two are pitted against each other. In the campaign, they Handwaved the conflict as the two were given conflicting orders that prevent them from backing down. The Space Marine were ordered by their Chapter Master and Chief-Librarian (the sequel named him Azariah Kyras) to purge the planet so that they can possess relics that hold secrets of their unknown origin, while the Imperial Guards were ordered to secure the planet so that they can control the planet from the clutches of the T'au Empire. The two commanders respect each other but they must follow orders thoroughly, so they must submit the other by force. Since the Space Marine campaign is canon, people become suspicious of the Blood Raven's actions...
  • Like Dark Crusade, the Blood Raven Space Marines, the Imperial Guards, and the Order of the Sacred Rose Sisters of Battle, three armed forces in service to the Imperium of Man, are in a Mêlée à Trois conflict against all of the alien forces and each other for control of the Kaurava System. Unlike Dark Crusade, their reasoning against each other is lacking and unexplained, with only the Sister of Battle reasoning that they are tainted by corruption. With the former, they might have a point.

• Loads and Loads of Loading: While all games in the series have Loading Screens, and quite long ones for the largest Dark Crusade campaign maps, Soulstorm is just guilty of this. On a computer able to operate the previous games at the middle mark of visual settings seamlessly, Soulstorm will take nearly twice as long to load the poorly programmed campaign map, than it will to load any level.
  • Dawn of War II at least gives you some pretty pictures and helpful advice to look at while you wait for your opponents to finish loading.
• Love Makes You Evil: In a non-romantic example, the traitor in Chaos Rising if it's Thaddeus explains that Ulkair began whispering to him a long time ago, and he was perfectly happy to completely ignore it... until the final mission of the campaign when it looked like a Bolivian Army Ending was inevitable and it told him, "Pledge yourself to me for later, I'll open the Warp right now so the Litany of Fury can get through the Tyranid interference." Given that this isn't a part of anyone else's reason for turning should they be the traitor, it's likely this is a flagrant lie and the fleet made it through on its own, but Sergeant Thaddeus believes it, and believes his bargain saved his friends.
• Ludicrous Gibs: A number of sync kills leave these, while even normal shooting results in quite a bit of bloodshed.
  • There was a chance that when the Imperial Guard Sanctioned Psyker uses one of his special abilities that it will backfire with messy results.
  • In Dawn of War II, a number of ranged weapons (notably Assault Cannons and Web Spinners) turn anything they kill into giblets.
  • A bit silly for the Tyranid Carnifex, who will tumble onto its stomach, curl up into a ball, explode outwards, and leave a wreck. (The game engine treats Carnifexes as vehicles.)
  • The summoning of the Bloodcrushers (Dawn Of War II) and Bloodthirsters (Dawn Of War), the latter of which doubled up as the death animation for Eliphas the Inheritor in the Chaos stronghold defeat in Dark Crusade.
  • When the Great Unclean One dies, his ribcage explodes outwards.
  • As a relatively mild example, the simple Space Marine bolter in 'Dawn of War II'' tends to cause huge splashes of blood or blow off limbs when they kill enemies, unlike the original game where they act more like generic firearms. This is actually more faithful to the lore.
• Luke Nounverber: Most major Ork characters have them.
  • In Dawn of War II the bosses use single-word names but they still qualify: Gutrencha, Skykilla, Badzappa, Blitzzagga, Rippa-Splitta, Bakstabba and Warboss Bonesmasha.
  • Retribution Gives us Kaptin Bluddflagg and Warboss Smashface. There's also his underlings, whose names are more Nounnoun — Mista Nailbrain and Brikkfist.
  • And of course, Gorgutz Deffscreama Bloodspilla Deffkilla Ragescreama Ghostkilla Gunsmasha Daemonkilla 'Ead'unter. (Plus, according to some fans, Bitchslappa.)

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